The current text color is brought to you by the weather in Slippery Rock, PA
//Here is some stuff I've done for personal, open source, or just for fun
In my spare time when I'm not in a class, at work, or working on a project for someone I have my own projects I work on. Here I have made an attempt to showcase them with links to their respective locations on the web.
//It's my baby :3
MonsterGrid is a project I started back in 2008 as my attempt to jump on the band wagon of DIY WordPress themes. I failed for a few reasons such as over ambitious goals, and a lack of knowledge in PHP or the WordPress functions in general. So the project was scrapped for a while until I wanted to rebuild my website (I was going to college and wanted to impress the potential geek colleagues), so I dusted off MonsterGrid and began converting it back to a static HTML template. From there it kind of evolved into this mass of CSS and HTML set up in a way that seems unnecessary at some times but also makes web site construction a tad simpler because it lets you get beyond the "how do I set it up to make columns?" step.
It is an open source project licensed under the GNU General Public License and you can get your own copy to play with in its Google Code Repository. I would give you a screenshot, however it is a skeleton which is best viewed in code form & you are technically looking at it right now. This website was built utilizing MonsterGrid's prebuilt block-like code where you can easily rearrange chunks with little to no issue (unless you break the div or something).
//And now for the forecast, meteors!
Weatherman is a project of mine utilizing a combination of PHP and SVG to present the weather to you via the Yahoo! Weather API. It was originally born from the thought that I could control CSS based off of a dynamic variable, and what better than the weather. Sometime in Fall of 2010 I had a course that required a web application that be dynamic with a combination of both serverside script and clientside interactions. Thusly Weatherman was born. It can currently generate the majority of weather conditions put out by Yahoo! Weather's API. The API itself has approximatley 50 different icons it uses, however there is a much greater range of conditions it lists versus images used. My solution was to find the conditions and their modifiers to generate graphics through PHP and defined SVG shapes. This allowed me to dynamically produce 50! (a lot) different graphics to meet whatever conditions were produced, one of my favorites was Snow Thunder.
I plan to update it in the future to HTML 5, a more efficient PHP script, and possible a different weather API as well as GEO IP services to make it cooler. In the mean time, if you happen to discover a condition that doesn't have a graphic rendered for it. Tell me what it is via my contact page so I may go and add a definition for it.