Top-notch hypertext and what have you
Believe it or not, I’ve actually made a few things beside this site. Handily, some of this stuff is available on the web for public scrutiny. Feel free to give it a good going-over. If you like what you see, drop me a line; I’d love to hear your feedback.
Regextastic
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An incomplete but functional web application to aid in building regular expressions. While perhaps not so useful to a seasoned regex master, testing tools such as this can prove invaluable to the beginner.
This personal project was undertaken after a survey of existing, similar applications gave unimpressive results. The goal was to create something pleasant-looking and — more importantly — usable, while maintaining a consistent look across browsers.
Work was done entirely in Photoshop and Vim, employing semantic XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, PHP, and JavaScript, including so-called AJAX techniques. A modular design ensures ease in future addition of other regex flavors using any programming language available on the server.
The end result is an appealing, friendly, and comfortable little app for cutting one’s teeth on regular expressions or getting some visual feedback on a stubborn regex.
Brandi’s Weblog
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Everybody who’s anybody has a blog, and my wife is no exception. After following her friends’ blogs for a while, Brandi decided to publish some of her own thoughts.
Using the Blogger platform afforded her a fair amount of customization via an intuitive interface. It, however, suffered from the all too familiar cookie cutter syndrome common to blogs. To separate itself from the multitude of humdrum weblogs, the site now sports a custom look.
The facelift was carried out à la css Zen Garden, barely touching the Blogger template code in only one instance. Umbrella Type’s Plumero, an old-timey wallpaper background, and a few flourishes — along with a dollop of CSS — make for a compelling new look for this blog.
txttopuz.pl
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I used to receive the local newspaper. After ending my subscription, I found that the only part I missed was the crossword puzzle. As luck would have it, Red Sweater Software released its excellent Black Ink shortly thereafter. It was the first crossword application I had come across that was a pleasure to use, and came with several quality puzzle sources built-in.
But it didn’t have my puzzle. That is to say, it didn’t have King Features Syndicate’s puzzle. After a little digging, I found a source for the puzzle in digital form, albeit in an incompatible format. It was plain text, and Black Ink only accepts Across Lite’s binary .puz format. After poking around a bit in a hex editor, I understood the .puz format well enough to write a conversion script.
My Perl script, txttopuz.pl, simply takes the plain text file and spits out a .puz file that Black Ink can read. Combined with a simple shell script and set up as a cron job, the puzzle is ready to join its peers in Black Ink’s convenient web source list.