Skip to content

Try Ruby

Aug 23, 2011

I’m trying to come to grips with Ruby on Rails, and the website Try Ruby was suggested to me.

It was a really impressive online tutorial set-up as a user prompt.  I really appreciate that it’s one Ruby tutorial that doesn’t require me to be download and installing packages willy-nilly to get started 😛  It’s extremely newbie-friendly and is well written and utilizes some light humor to help you get through it 🙂  I think the last chapter was a bit clumsy…but may have just had one too many typos along the way.

Regardless, I’d say the “15 minute” bit is no lie and well worth the time if you’re trying to get better acquainted with Ruby or RoR such as myself.

http://tryruby.org/

Free seamless patterns

Aug 17, 2011

Subtle Patterns is a lovely site featured some really great seamless patterns.  Best of all they’re commercial free so no worries about plugging these into your designs 🙂

The patterns are all fairly muted.  Nothing really crazy.  They’re very well made and look professional.  I was really happy to find this site, and I’m planning on using some of their textures in future designs.  Light textures like these are a great way to add a little more interest and depth to a piece of design without going overboard.

Plus patterns are “in” right now, and it’s always fun to be trendy 😉

http://subtlepatterns.com/

350s gallery

Aug 12, 2011

I randomly made this little webpage to showcase a lot of 350×200 openers I made for online articles 🙂

It’s a pretty simple script built on top of jquery:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21

<style type="text/css">
body {
    margin:0;
    overflow:hidden;
}
</style>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
    $("div").mousemove(function(e){
      height = $(window).height();
        width = $(window).width();
        percent = e.clientY * 100 / height;
        move = ($("#box").height()-height) * percent / 100;
        $("body").scrollTop(move);
 
        percent2 = e.clientX * 100 / width;
        move2 = ($("#box").width()-width) * percent2 / 100;
        $("body").scrollLeft(move2);
    });
});
</script>

The CSS hides the scrollbars and removes the default margins from the body.

Then the Javascipt adds an event handler that will fire every time the mouse moves on top of a div – which is always since the page is pretty much just one giant div.  After that it determines what percent of the window you cursor is currently sitting at, and then translates that to the same percentage of the size of that giant div and scrolls the window accordingly.  So regardless of the size of the window you’ll be able to move it around to see all the contents of the div.

Scroll around the box below to see the random goodness:

Convert a website to PDF

Aug 9, 2011

Ever come across a website and wish you could save it for later?  For offline reading on an iPod – or just to save it for prosperity?  The you’re in luck 🙂  When I wanted to save a copy of an online tutorial I looked up the site Web 2 PDF.  It was easy to use and only took a few seconds to turn an entire web page into a PDF.  I was impressed by how close it looked to the original and it kept all of the text selectable.

If you’re lucky enough to have a full version of Acrobat you can even combine all the PDFs together to make your very own DRM free eBook 🙂

http://www.web2pdfconvert.com/

Japanese Color Guide

Aug 4, 2011

While attending my online Japanese class one of the other students shared a link to the lovely Japanese Color Guide site.  What is cool about this site is that it has translations for a heap of different colors next to a sample of the color itself.  They don’t have every color under the sun, but it’s a nice resource if you’ve ever wondered how to say vermillion in Japanese (Syu-iro by the way.)

http://www.color-guide.com/e_index.shtml