1 x 52, Week 1: Download all DaFont fonts
This month, I made a list of things I wanted to accomplish in year 26. I took inspiration from Chris Guillebreau’s Annual Review, and actually did it on a spreadsheet, with a list of goals, first steps, and spaces each quarter to review.
One of my goals is to complete a 1 x 52 project: a project in which I launch a new web project, outside my work, every week. It could be a new website, or just a project – but something that will hopefully be interesting or useful to someone, somewhere.
Presenting Project 1
For the week of July 23, my project is two mini-projects: PluralizeIt.com, and a script to rip all the DaFont.com fonts.
The script to download all DaFont.com fonts rips all 10,000+ fonts from DaFont. I’ve run the script (which takes a few hours when hosted on my InMotion server) and downloaded the fonts (nearly a gig worth!), but haven’t installed them yet. I wrote a script to install them on Mac, also. The script unzips each zipped file, finds the fonts inside, and installs them by putting them in /Library/Fonts. I haven’t run the script on my own computer yet, because I’m not sure how programs will handle this many fonts. Finder itself isn’t very good at displaying a large number of files – it actually can’t display all these fonts, you have to use the command line.
On our trip out to California, I started seeing people write things like “Tomato’s for Sale” ALL over the place. I started taking pictures and putting them together – and paired it with a script to properly pluralize words. There are TONS of cases which the script won’t be quite right, I’m sure – English is difficult! – but here’s a start.
I’m not crazy about PluralizeIt, because while it seemed fun at the time, it seems pretentious in hindsight. I really don’t care how people pluralize things at all, and I doubt it makes much of a difference if they do. But anyway, here’s project 1, and improving my projects is the whole point of this 1 x 52 project. The following projects will hopefully be more interesting. 