The lab

As any developer does, I have a number of mini-projects that I built to prove a point or test out a theory. Some of them never get beyond the idea stage, some theories don’t work, some make it to full projects. Of course, there are some mini-projects which work and are cool but that don’t make it to the big time - and those projects end up here (If you want to see the full blown projects page, check out MadPilot Code).

Canvas Text Replacement

I presented this project at the Perth WebJam last year. If you think sIFR, but without the requirement for flash. I don’t think this is a viable technique though, because of the size of the font files required, but it is still a good demo of converting SVG to something the canvas element can use.

You can’t do that on twitter

This definitely falls under the “stupid things you do at 11 o’clock at night” category. Spurred on my @cybner’s new avatar, I thought it would be cool if you could slime people in Twitter if the say “I don’t know”.

So after a couple of hours of ruby hacking, I came up with: You can’t do that on twitter. Everytime someone says the magic words, you should see their avatar get slimed! You can even try the public timeline or your own timeline (Click here and and change madpilot in the url to your username). Note though, that because this isn’t authenticated, your timeline will need to be public for it to work.

JavaScript Mario Brothers

This little (award nominated) project implements a facsimile of world 1-1 of Mario Brother - but with a twist - it is done completely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The level is built as you would with a website (except with absolute positioning), each sprite is given a behaviour by class name, using un-obtrusive JavaScript and the sprite animation is done by the CSS background positioning technique. I think it is a good example of making JavaScript do things it shouldn’t!

Offline vs Online Marketing

What started out as a drunken bet has created a full on experiment. Alex Pooley and I are having a little competition: Who can generate the most leads and conversions in a month, but with a twist - Alex can only do it online, and I can only do it offline!