Side projects

iconizr is a free, Node.js / Grunt and command line PHP tool for processing SVG files to CSS icon kits, catering for the full range of devices and clients out there. It creates SVG and PNG fallback icon sprites, their data URI counterparts and the matching CSS in various flavours like Sass and LESS. It optimizes both SVG and PNG files in terms of size and offers some logic for CSS pseudo-classes. An online version is available at iconizr.com. Here are some details about the internals and ideas behind iconizr.

squeezr is a free PHP library for server side image and CSS manipulation. It aims to match the dimensions of images to the client device’s limits and / or strips out CSS parts that would never apply to the client device. It can help you preserve your visitor's bandwidth and thus improve the overall browsing experience across the different devices.

sasswatch is a little Bash script for Gentoo Linux that makes it possible to run sass --watch in the background without having a console window lingering around. It takes care of an arbitrary number of projects at the same time. This is the way we employ Sass on our development servers.

micrometa is a PHP micro information meta parser that I quickly hacked together while developing this website. It’s main purpose is to consume several different micro information formats (Microformats (µF), Microformats 2 and the W3C Microdata specification) and provide a common API to them.

edropub is a PHP command line script that brings together Editorially, Dropbox and Leanpub to form a simple editing and publishing stack for Markdown based ebooks.

slendr is a yet-to-be-published, experimental development project providing several mainly CSS-driven navigation patterns for modern responsive multi-device websites. It is mainly based on CSS (respectively Sass), but has also some minor HTML and JavaScript parts. A little portion of slendr is incorporated into this website.

On the bottom line this project deals with a very specific and seemingly easy task: The correct formatting of international postal addresses. While working on this subject, I had to learn that it’s not a piece of cake to correctly format an address — and in many cases, there is nothing such as "the one correct" format.

MiteMite is Japanese — みてみて — and means as much as “Look here!”. We use it as the name of a little online community project my wife and I are running for the Japanese living in the Nuremberg Metropolitan Region (and beyond).

Over the years, I developed several dozen of TYPO3 extensions for various purposes. Most of them were custom-tailored for some client’s project, but some were generally useful and worth sharing — so I published them to the TYPO3 extension repository.