Picking up on Monday’s post, I built a little design tool that generates random ideas about how to place two elements in relationship to one another.

I mainly used JavaScript to build this and I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. The tool already suggests a bunch of next features to add: ability for visitors to add their own components, ability to relate more than two things, ability to save placements that seem to make sense and annotate them, adding pictures, flash etc.

One thing I started thinking about is creating each element as an object with inputs and outputs and relationships to its consumers and producers. For example a chicken produces feathers, eggs and fertilizer and consumes seed, grass etc. The lawn produces grass. The garden and lawn needs fertilizer. The house needs pillows which need feathers. By setting rates on all these things, we can start to build very sophisticated models and simulations. But that’s obviously a larger project.

I’m starting to mess around with PHP, and got the left hand navigation bar in davefeasey.net built as a single list that is contextual, meaning it knows what page you’re on and so turns off the link and bolds the text for the current page. I’m learning the ropes on include files and I think I finally have that pegged; the paths are different since I’m in a shared / virtual environment and can’t see all the way up my directory tree. Also had to figure out how to hide the INI file.