Idea Magazine, a journal of ideas & technology in Ireland, is launching on Thursday, December 8th. Best of luck to Martha and Stu.

Here’s an example of it in action:

from docraptor import DocRaptor

docraptor = DocRaptor()
resp = docraptor.create({
        'document_content': '<p>python-docraptor Test</p>',
        'test': True
    })
# PDF data is now available in resp.content

Visit the repository for more examples.

One, Baseliner is a JavaScript tool, that creates a baseline grid overlay. There is an accompanying bookmarklet, which means it’s easy to drop a grid over any page.

The other, Baseline Background, is a web app that generates PNGs that can be used to create your baseline grid (Baseliner uses this).

There are a few reasons why I’ve published these, the most important being that I enjoy creating things. That aside, I believe it’s important to continue learning new skills and to hone current ones. So when creating these works I tried to do achieve it with some technologies that I hadn’t used before.

My first cut of Baseliner was jQuery powered. It’s too easy to turn to jQuery when writing any JavaScript for the web. So one of my first tasks after the initial release, was to remove this dependency, and to write pure JavaScript. There is nothing groundbreaking involved, but it felt good to do some work at that level.

Early versions also used PNGlib, a JavaScript library, for generating the background images. I then referenced these images using data:uris and base64 encoded images, again a first for me. That led an investigation into browser support and the inevitability that it wouldn’t work in IE6 and IE7.

Another aspect I dived into was how to deliver the latest version of Baseliner for the bookmarklet. I had to host it somewhere, so I decided to use CloudFront, not because it was necessary, but because it was something else that I hadn’t used before.

Then I decided to drop the PNGlib dependency and setup a web app to serve the PNGs. My first stab at this was a simple PHP script. That was to prove the concept, then I thought this would be a great opportunity to try a Django deployment on Heroku. This was something that I’d wanted to try for a while, so the timing couldn’t have been better. The app is now running at baselinebg.keyes.ie.

The two apps are MIT licensed so feel free to have a look around.

Even with a simple problem, you can learn something while implementing it’s resolution. Maybe the next time you have a smallish problem, you’ll use a new tool to resolve it. It’s just another reason why I love the web, it provides great opportunities for continuous learning.

A couple of hours later and I have an initial version of Baseliner ready to roll. It is currently based on jQuery (for personal efficiency, but there is no reason why it can’t be rewritten in unadorned JavaScript) and PNGlib to dynamically create the background images.

I’ll stick the source on GitHub soon, but in the meantime, here’s a fifty five second preview of it in action:

Here’s a badge which you can stick on your site to publicise your endorsement of the manifesto:

The new version includes support for dependency checking. For example, say we have header.less and style.less imports it:

/* styles.less */
@import "header";

body {
...
}

When header.less is changed, lesswatch compiles
both header.less and styles.less.

It uses watchdog’s watchmedo script, which can run a command when a file change is detected. watchdog is implemented in Python and can be installed from PyPi. Compilation from LESS to CSS is performed by lessc.

lesswatch is a command line script (no idea what a command line is? have a read of The Designers Guide to the OS X Command Prompt) that watches directories you specify for LESS file changes:

$ lesswatch media/css
compile: /Users/john/media/css/sample.less
wrote: /Users/john/media/css/sample.css
compile: /Users/john/media/css/sample.less
Syntax Error on line 2 in /Users/john/media/css/sample.less
1 body {
2   background:
3 }

You can download lesswatch from GitHub.

I didn’t win the underware champagne.

More photos.