Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

How cool is this?

Poking around the web this evening, I stumbled upon Your Fonts, a FREE!!! web based font generator. The process is pretty straight forward. You download the two page template (the second page is optional), and write your characters in the corresponding boxes. They recommend using a fine tip permanent marker. I used a fine point Sharpie, though I think a super-fine point might be better, especially if you have poor penmanship like myself. Once you fill in all the characters—there’s even a box for your signature, which corresponds to the carat (shift-6 on most keyboards), you scan the page and upload it via their web interface. The fonts were generated quite quickly (though I do have a pretty fast upload speed), ~1 minute later, and I was able to download the font.

You get the option of naming the font, as well as adding your name to the copyright. Reading through their FAQ, you retain full ownership of the generated font, including the freedom to share or sell the font.

I would recommend reading through all of the steps before uploading, including printing a second copy to practice. My first attempt I didn’t pay attention to the guides, and the bottom of a few of the characters were cut off.

The possibilities of this service are endless. I don’t see why one couldn’t use the second, optional page for creating your own custom dingbats. I could also see it being a quite novel thing if you had children to have them write out their alphabet and save it for posterity. Any family member for that matter. Imagine having your parent’s or grandparent’s handwriting archived.

Anyway, I thought it was a super cool discovery, and well worth sharing. If you create your own, I’d love to see it.

Updated!

I inadvertently forgot to remove tracking code from the footer from when the theme was deployed on my previous site, so I’m removing the old download link and updating the release. Apologies to anyone who’s already downloaded the theme, you can download the updated version (0.3.1), which also has $theme->footer(); added, which can be a useful plugin hook.

I’m proud to release my fourth Habari theme, the third port, Aqueous. Based on an open source design by Six Shooter Media, this 3 column theme sports a fluid width middle column. The original icons have been redone with custom icons that I created so there’s no issue with redistribution. I also have restyled the comments and comment form from the original design, as well as a few other modifications for a working blog, but it still maintains the original integrity of the design, which I’ve always liked. It has that clean, modern feel to it, despite being several years old now.

I had originally ported this theme for a personal site when I first switched over to Habari, and have just never gotten around to releasing it. Now that I’m not using that site, it seemed only logical to make it available to other Habari users, especially with the lack of themes in the community. I hope that changes sooner than later, hopefully after .6 gets released and .7 starts focusing more on the theme engine. I’m curious to see what people have in mind for it, but that’s for another blog post.

I’m releasing this as an alpha release, because I really haven’t tested it in other browsers aside from Safari 4beta, but wanted to get it out and see if there was any real interest before putting too much more time into it.

One idea that I have for future a release is author comment styling, as it currently styles the comments all the same. Again, this will happen if I see that’s there is actually any interest in the theme.

The original design was released under a Creative Commons license, so there’s no chance of the theme moving to the Habari extras repository, so any comments, bugs, feature requests should be left in the comments on this post. Future posts about releases will direct comments to this post. There’s nothing worse than a site having comments scattered about the same theme/plugin.

Download Aqueous 0.3.1 alpha now.