html character entities -

I created this reference guide for myself as a look-up to convert standard (and not-so-standard) characters to HTML entities and numeric character references. As an exercise to myself, I wanted to create a visually interesting page without the use of graphics. This design represents one of my earliest uses of CSS in my code.

web-color reference guide -

The web-color chart is another guide I created for myself. I wanted to be able to look at text colors against different backgrounds so I could determine what was legible. As a PHP experiment, I generated the code from scripts, and for each color example, added a randomized element for the corners. Thus each time you view the page, the color blocks have different shapes. Of course, web colors aren’t so important anymore for most design projects, but I still think the forms are interesting. Note: this page tends to load a bit sluggishly as each color block is created using nested tables.

the language of flowers -

During one of my more romantic periods I started looking into the meanings of different flowers. I discovered that historically people have been associating thoughts, feelings, and words with different flowers. Popularized by the Victorians “Florigraphy” was developed in Turkey and spread through France to the rest of Europe and the United States. Each flower is given a meaning (e.g. red roses = love), and thus bouquets of different flowers can tell an entire story. I have never been clear as to how one is to know what order to “read” the flower bouquets in. I compiled a list of different flowers and their meanings (although it would appear that different sources describe different definitions), and ordered them alphabetically into a list. From a design standpoint, this page represents one of my early experiments with using text as a navigation tool instead of image-swapping through JavaScript.