qHighlight! – The First Project Out of Dave’s Lab.com
Mar 24 2009
(You can skip all this emotional gobbledy-gook below by going below the fold)
Starting from when I first started playing around with making websites, I had dreams of owning my own dot com website. Initially, I was just using Front Page to place some files onto a free web account, which I believe was on Lycos’ Tripod, now out of business. Later a friend of mine who owned a dedicated server was nice enough to give me a little space, and I continued to play with these emerging technologies. Only this time, I didn’t have ads on my page!
While I was excited by the prospect of having my own websites, the strongest description I could give to these efforts is “dabbling.” In college, however, I returned to my old curiosity and started to code HTML by hand. Unlike before, I now had access to awesome computers all over my campus and a smokin’ broadband internet connection, as well as one tiny programming course under my belt. I dove right on in and became immersed. Armed with 100 MB on my college’s web server and the kind help of my college webmaster, I had free reign to learn HTML, PHP, CSS, Javascript, MySQL, etc etc.
A year later, I finally looked up the cost of getting my own domain and web host and was shocked at how unbelievably cheap my options were. Regardless of the ease of the process, I was still determined to have my first domain name be a memorable one, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I settled on daves-lab.com. At the time, I was studying Physics and Engineering, and the lab was like a comfortable second home to me. Projects and project ideas were spontaneous and exciting, and although not every idea I had in there was executed, it was a wonderful place to test and display my abilities. Similarly, I wanted this new website to be my new playground, scratch pad, and personal display case.
Sad to say, that vision really never materialized and my little corner shop on the internet still had blankets all over the boxes and sign in big bold letters saying “Coming soon!”.
Well, folks, I am beaming proud to say that I’ve released my first project! It’s called qHighlight, short for “quick highlighter”, and you can read about it below.
qHighlight is a little web app that highlights the source code of any file publicly available on the internet. It’s most easily available as a Javascript bookmarklet that can click any time you’re viewing a file in your browser. I created it because I’m often quite curious about the CSS/JS that make up some of the sites I’m viewing. However, not only can it grab the source of any CSS, JS, HTML, XML, and other common web development files, it can view Python, Ruby, C/C++, and Java text files! This should be super handy when you want to view a file in a way that’s easier on the eyes without copying and pasting it into your local text editor.
But enough chit chat, let me just show you (in HD!):
Zoltan Says:
