SlatePermutate is a PHP and Javascript-driven interface for college class scheduling. SP parses course identifiers (such as MATH-2500) and autofills all available sections associated with the course. After submission, SlatePermutate presents a tabbed interface of all possible schedules, course conflicts excluded.

SlatePermutate currently supports autofill for:

• Cedarville University
• Calvin College
• University of Michigan (beta)
• Michigan State (beta)
• Community College of Baltimore County

Support for additional schools is progressing incrementally.

SlatePermutate is deployed at Cedarville University and Calvin College, with a deployment on Protofusion available as well. Note that deployments at individual schools will not necessarily crawl course data from all supported institutions.

• Project Information
• Bug Tracker

Throughout the history of the internet, chat rooms and forums have grown exponentially. Many people in these chat rooms were annoyed at the use of explicit language, so administrators implemented censoring of inappropriate words.Censoring, as originally implemented, resulted in a lack of emotion from a user’s censored statement while allowing the conveyance of meaning. Circumcensoring does just the opposite, it allows the expression of emotion without allowing much meaning to be conveyed. Due to the obvious uniqueness of circumcensoring and the virtues that must be obvious to the reader, I am planning on implementing circumcensoring in an unrealircd plugin, aptly named CircumCensor. Although this plugin is bound to remain undeveloped for a while, it may eventually be developed whenever I have free time.

You can now purchase [protofusion] T-shirts!

[protofusion] T-shirts are available in light-colored shirt varieties:

• grey logo
• blue logo

Blue [protofusion] logos on dark shirts are also available. I can put the logo on additional shirts colors on request. This includes such as darker shirts (which are more expensive).

The average price (including shipping) for a shirt is about $19.70. If you want to print shirts at a local screen-printer, I can provide you with the source files to print; just let me know in the comments.

In this short guide, you can learn how to create an easy yet professional-looking fixed-width website with free open-source software. Before you begin, ensure that you have the Gimp and Inkscape installed, in addition to some form of text or code editor (any variety will do).

This guide provides a basic guideline on creating a site simply and easily using few tools. Feel free to try different techniques, see how it works, and leave some feedback in the comments. Feel free to comment on how to improve this article!

Initial Design

First, open up Inkscape and begin visualizing what you want your design to look like. If you have not used Inkscape before, check out this simple Inkscape tutorial.

Things to keep in mind:

• Your design should include a header, menu bar, mid-image portion, and footer portion
• The menu bar portion can have image-mapped links, or you can overlay text links on a background image
• The middle image portion should be vertically tileable for a fixed-width variable-height site.
• The footer can include image-based text, or text can be overlayed on a background image

After you visualize your initial design in Inkscape, you should have something similar to the image below. In this tutorial, we will be creating a site with a header, an image-mapped menubar, a tiled text background, and a footer image.

Your initial Inkscape design should look something like this

Exporting the Design

After you have created your design in Inkscape, you must export it to a raster format so it can be parsed by web browsers. The resulting raster image also needs to be separated into different portions that we will reference in our CSS. The fastest and easiest way to accomplish this is by creating a “chopper” layer above the layer(s) your design is in. Go to [Layer –> Add Layer (select “Above Current”)] and put in whatever name you wish.

In this layer, you will now begin creating squares to mask off various portions of your design. Start out by dragging a square across the header portion of your design. Zoom in and make sure that the edges of your mask are aligned with the edges of your design. After you create the first mask, copy the mask and paste it below. This time, center the block on your design and only adjust the height, not the width. Continue this process until you mask each portion of your site: header, menu bar, middle tile, and footer. I find it easiest to color-code these sections and make them semi-opaque, as shown below.

Your completed theme with different portions in different translucent colors should look something like this

Finished? Take a break and check out some of the notes below.

Notes:

• The footer in this design will have copyright info on the image itself, therefore search engines and visitors printing out your site will not have footer information. You can easily add a text-based footer to your design, but this won’t be covered in this tutorial (yet)
• Many other items, such as the menubar imagemap, can be substituted with a text-based menu with an image background behind it. This is usually a bit more flexible, and nicer to search engines.

Ready to move on? If you know some CSS, you can probably figure out this part yourself. You can create