Github Projects for June 2011

• ~600 words • 3 minute read

Here's the second installment in my monthly series on interesting projects I've found over on GitHub over the month of June 2011:

  • html-compressor — A nice command-line tool for compressing HTML files. Helpful for custom build scripts on certain projects that I want to minify before deploying. Combine with YUI-Compressor and Google Closure to really shrink the shit out of things.

  • SoundManager2 — Not bad for playing MP3s, but seems to require Flash which is odd.

  • mediaelement - A better version of the previous, but styling is a little trickier. Not crazy about the default audio player, but it's still good.

  • jquery-pjax — Checked this out because I was curious. Considering building it into this blog to make things load faster. Manipulating the browser history is an interesting and upcoming trend in web development.

  • box2d.js — I checkout projects like this when I daydream about making games.

  • showdown — JavaScript-driven Markdown converter. Excellent for a secret project I'm working on. Strangely abandoned in 2007 and the only JavaScript Markdown formatter I could find. I forked a copy.

  • jQuery-fieldselection — I was building my own blog editor using the previously listed showdown and this. It's a nice tool for figuring out what text the user has selected in a <textarea> element

  • iPhone-style Checkboxes &mdash I noticed these on Prey (Which is a neat project in itself) and just thought they looked neato.

  • Dropbox API wrapper command — Combined with the somewhat hidden ability to "archive" items within Dropbox, I'm using this script to quickly archive older projects from the command line. It's really great!

  • jQuery TextMate Bundle — I recently got a little adventurous with my automated scripting and accidentally deleted a ton of configuration files in my home directory. Oops! The plus side, as I rebuilt my TextMate environment I stumbled across this nice bundle that makes developing in jQuery a little faster.

  • jQuery — Speaking of jQuery, I decided to clone the project this month. Always nice to have the latest version available locally, and sometimes pouring through the uncompressed, unminified code can be a good learning experience.

  • Raphael — A JavaScript library that lets you play with SVG. It also plays nicely with jQuery. Used it in a number of projects before but finally cloned it this month to stay on top of the latest updates.

  • php-liquid — Liquid has quickly become my favorite templating language over the past year. It's clear, concise and powerful. Because of the prevalence of PHP in open-source and my day-to-day work, I thought it would be nice to incorporate Liquid templates in this environment and I was very pleased to find this. This GitHub version is a forked version of Mateo Murphy's original project hosted on Google Code.

  • paper.js - A very powerful vector-graphic library that use the HTML5 <canvas> tag. Check out the beautiful examples.

  • jPlayer - This is actually a much more flexible tool for HTML5 video and audio than the other two I experimented with up above.

  • visualsearch - I only discovered this project after reading up about DocumentCloud, which is a really fascinating service for journalists. They've contributed a lot of good work to open-source for document processing. This particular project however is just a nice way of visually manipulating a search box.

In case you missed it, you can read my list of GitHub projects for May 2011. Last but not least, please don't forget to check-out my open-source projects on GitHub as well!