Art in Lit is this new project I’m working on. It’s in the very early stages, but there’s something useful going on there. The plan is to create an index of artworks found in literature. This would be useful to students, teachers, and writers. Of course this will take a lot of time to document every artwork found in pieces of literature. So far just a few have been listed, and some not completely. But there’s good news.

You can help build the database. You like to read or want to be part of a fun, informative project that will help many? You can sign up for an account and add listings yourself, or once you’ve joined you can correct information already listed.

Eventually there will be forums to discuss the literature and the artworks. Find out more at www.artinlit.com.

A recent site I completed some custom Drupal work for had me creating a couple slide shows with the views slideshow module. One is on the homepage at www.interactiveexperience.nl.

Also I wrote some custom PHP to handle views for layouts. The regular views output had be changed so that the classes and ids would match with a prewritten css stylesheet. I also hooked the mini-pager so that it would fit the style.

I also wrote custom jQuery to handle a design gallery on the portfolio page with fancybox. Fancybox is  a type of lightbox for image galleries. The biggest trick was getting the fancybox to cycle through the images from each portfolio selection, not for the entire page.

Recently this amazing Chicago calligrapher (okay she’s my wife) told me she wanted a new website. So we set about creating something. She’s on a purple kick so we used purple for the design.

She wanted something fun and different on the homepage, so I used jQuery to create some cards coming out of some envelopes. It’s just a few layer images, and one moving up and down.

Also there’s a sample page, where the images are enlarged for easier viewing. Again, jQuery came to the rescue, in a way similar to Lightbox – my own design of course.

You can check out the design, or her calligraphy, at gracefulquill.com