What My Week Has Entailed – July 29th 2011
This has been an extremely busy week for me. I’ve almost finished a client, I’ve launched 2 toy projects, made my efforts of another public on Github, I’ve posted 4 new dribbles of which 2 are websites I’ve launched. And a lot more. I thought I’d write a post of what I’ve done this week and what I’ve seen elsewhere. So…
Toy Projects
Lorem-Ipsum.me
Realising that my current process for getting Lorem Ipsum is not as quick as it could be nor reflects the media I am generally designing for (blogs, not essays), I decided to create a new Lorem Ipsum generator. Within a few hours I pushed live my Lorem-Ipsum generator, complete with its own mini-API and Copy To Clipboard link.
iOS Viewers
Finding switching between my Mac, my iPhone and my iPad to test websites got rather a frustrating process. After seeing a tutorial on how to make simulators, I decided to expand the idea further and then packaged it up neatly with custom icons.
Dribbble
1796 Foods
My best friend is on an incredible food quest to eat 1796 ‘must try’ foods. It’s an incredible undertaking that affects her daily life and almost into her 20th month she’s just reached 519. I promised her I would redesign her blog as a way to commend her for her efforts. This is a sample of the sidebar.
London Made – Reimagined
I decided that I wanted to see what I would come up with now if I redesigned London Made. It was not a commitment to redesign but I am pursuing other styles and options. This is what it would look like if I went for a textured dark version.
Website Launch
The Angel Inn
After many decades running a huge pub, my parents decided to retire. Many years later they felt the need to get back into business and since have moved and bought a new pub.
I built them a website (although it is a little rough around the edges) and launched it for them. All the photographs are also taken by me. You can check it out at angelinnpetworth.co.uk.
Zach Inglis
I’ve relaunched this site as some of you will notice. I wanted to focus again on the content and less about the superfluous fluff that most blogs link to. Whether or not the design will stick for long or not is another matter, but I felt it was much better than the last.
Ruby
Taco Truck
I feel the Rails Project Template system doesn’t work in the way I feel it should. So I have started to write a replacement (built upon Thor.) It is designed under three assumptions:
- The people responsible for the gem, know the best way for integrating it into your project.
- Syntax changes. Methods and methods of installations are different from version to version. If you have the recipe for v1.5 of a project committed into the repository and a different one for the v2.0 release and people want to use 1.5 instead of 2… That’s not a problem.
- People don’t want to have to maintain Template files. When they do that, they end up not saving themselves that much time.
It is nowhere near done yet. I have worked outside in, building the main structure behind the system (using Testing-First principles of course.) I had barely programmed in almost a year prior to this and wanted to get back on the wagon so I set myself what felt like an impossible goal. You can view the efforts so far on Github.
Lorem-Ipsum.me Gem
The gem is a simple way to use the Lorem Ipsum API (the Gem is only a few lines of code itself.) To use, just add gem 'lorem-ipsum-me' to your Gemfile and call with LoremIpsum.generate. Check the Docs for what attributes it accepts.
About.me
I built an about.me page for anyone who wants to add me on social networks. Feel free to do so.
