--- title: Github Projects for June 2011 author: George Mandis date: 2011-07-06 description: Projects I forked, cloned or otherwise followed on GitHub in June 2011 tags: post --- Here's the second installment in my monthly series on interesting projects I've found over on GitHub over the month of June 2011: - [html-compressor](https://github.com/tylerhall/html-compressor) — A nice command-line tool for compressing HTML files. Helpful for custom build scripts on certain projects that I want to minify before deploying. Combine with YUI-Compressor and Google Closure to really shrink the shit out of things. - [SoundManager2](https://github.com/luke0x/soundmanager2) — Not bad for playing MP3s, but seems to require Flash which is odd. - [mediaelement](https://github.com/johndyer/mediaelement) - A better version of the previous, but styling is a little trickier. Not crazy about the default audio player, but it's still good. - [jquery-pjax](https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax) — Checked this out because I was curious. Considering building it into this blog to make things load faster. Manipulating the browser history is an interesting and upcoming trend in web development. - [box2d.js](https://github.com/HBehrens/box2d.js) — I checkout projects like this when I daydream about making games. - [showdown](https://github.com/georgemandis/showdown) — JavaScript-driven Markdown converter. Excellent for a secret project I'm working on. Strangely abandoned in 2007 and the only JavaScript Markdown formatter I could find. I forked a copy. - [jQuery-fieldselection](https://github.com/localhost/jquery-fieldselection) — I was building my own blog editor using the previously listed **showdown** and this. It's a nice tool for figuring out what text the user has selected in a <textarea> element - [iPhone-style Checkboxes](https://github.com/tdreyno/iphone-style-checkboxes) &mdash I noticed these on [Prey](http://preyprojects.com) (Which is a neat project in itself) and just thought they looked neato. - [Dropbox API wrapper command](https://github.com/s-aska/dropbox-api-command) — Combined with the somewhat hidden ability to "archive" items within Dropbox, I'm using this script to quickly archive older projects from the command line. It's really great! - [jQuery TextMate Bundle](https://github.com/Heintzsight/jquery-tmbundle) — I recently got a little adventurous with my automated scripting and accidentally deleted a ton of configuration files in my home directory. Oops! The plus side, as I rebuilt my TextMate environment I stumbled across this nice bundle that makes developing in jQuery a little faster. - [jQuery](https://github.com/jquery/jquery) — Speaking of jQuery, I decided to clone the project this month. Always nice to have the latest version available locally, and sometimes pouring through the uncompressed, unminified code can be a [good learning experience](http://paulirish.com/2010/10-things-i-learned-from-the-jquery-source/). - [Raphael](https://github.com/DmitryBaranovskiy/raphael) — A JavaScript library that lets you play with SVG. It also plays nicely with jQuery. Used it in a number of projects before but finally cloned it this month to stay on top of the latest updates. - [php-liquid](https://github.com/harrydeluxe/php-liquid) — [Liquid](http://www.liquidmarkup.org/) has quickly become my favorite templating language over the past year. It's clear, concise and powerful. Because of the prevalence of PHP in open-source and my day-to-day work, I thought it would be nice to incorporate Liquid templates in this environment and I was very pleased to find this. This GitHub version is a forked version of Mateo Murphy's original project hosted on [Google Code](http://code.google.com/p/php-liquid/). - [paper.js](https://github.com/paperjs/paper.js) - A very powerful vector-graphic library that use the HTML5 <canvas> tag. Check out the [beautiful examples](http://paperjs.org/). - [jPlayer](https://github.com/happyworm/jplayer/) - This is actually a much more flexible tool for HTML5 video and audio than the other two I experimented with up above. - [visualsearch](https://github.com/documentcloud/visualsearch) - I only discovered this project after reading up about [DocumentCloud](http://www.documentcloud.org/home), which is a really fascinating service for journalists. They've contributed a lot of good work to open-source for document processing. This particular project however is just a nice way of visually manipulating a search box. In case you missed it, you can read my list of [GitHub projects for May 2011](http://blog.georgemandis.com/2011/05/25/github-projects-for-may-2011.html). Last but not least, please don't forget to check-out [my open-source projects](http://code.snaptortoise.com) on GitHub as well!