This month I’ve had some fun making little web applications to celebrate the birthdays of friends and family. I think I’m going to make a habit of doing this – I’m always looking for an excuse to play around with jQuery, and people seem to get a kick out of them. Click on the images to check them out.
###Lisa’s Quest
As kids, my sister and I spent countless hours playing kings quest. I thought it would be fun to recreate the first scene from KQI to send a unique birthday message.
All graphics were grabbed from the game manually, and the everything is rendered as DOM ndoes. Sprites were used for the parts that are animated.
###Like a Day for Simmy I’ve got a friend that is notorious for “liking” just about everything that people post on facebook. So to repay her generosity, I made a page that gives her a thumbs up for every day that she’s been alive.
If you hover over any given “like” icon, it will show what day it represents. Likes that fell on her birthdays are highlighted in red. This turned out to be a pretty cool visualization of how many days any given 20-something year old has been alive (there really are LOTS of days).
In retrospect, I should have rendered the little hands in a canves element instead of appending nodes to the DOM. That way this page wouldn’t eat up nearly as much memory.
###iBradley.com Post-it-notified
In an act of general silliness at my last job, some coworkers completely covered our marketing director’s office in post it notes when he was away on a business trip. On his birthday, I decided to recreate that event on a copy of his personal website.
His website seemed particlarly well suited for this kind of vandalism.