Last year, I set myself the task of trying to actually produce a bunch of smaller web projects for s few reasons:
- To learn some new frameworks
- To illustrate my ability to learn there different frameworks
- To showcase my skills in development in general
To that end, I thought I’d explain each project here in my blog, and the motivation behind each.
First up is Kalliope – https://kalliope.hostnucleus.ca
This is a “font server” with two primary end-goals – be able to arbitrarily upload a true type font, and have it produce web downloadable fonts, or to actively serve unlicensed fonts (in the same vein as Google Fonts).
The latter end-goal (as detailed above) was actually the primary goal on project inception – I wanted to have the ability to use a variety of fonts, but I didn’t want Google snooping the traffic on my sites (e.g. cookies, etc.). You can think of it as a replace for Google Fonts, really.
The other end-goal came about when the place where I worked had a client who had purchased some proprietary font, and wanted it used on their website. I didn’t want this font directly in the font server itself (as it requires a license), but all the leg-work had already been done to perform the conversion.
Interestingly enough, the original work on this was actually done for a completely different project – I had implemented a lot of the code within a project for generating print materials using SVGs. Since the SVGs needed to be displayable in all browsers, as well as the final PDF, I decided to use “FontForge” to do all the heavy lifting. It was only years later when developing a website where it occurred to me to break out the functionality into a separate web service.
It’s also a good project to learn and showcase the Grails framework.