Open is a web application created by the West Side Story's Engineering and Development team. It's designed so that anybody, regardless of experience, can change properties of a webpage with ease.

Inputs for colors can be simple colors, like "red", "green", "white", etc. as well as hexadecimal colors for even more specificity.

Inputs for font faces can be "Helvetica", "Arial", "Times", and the like; these are basic webfonts.

Inputs for link formatting can include "underline", "line-through", or "overline".

If you have suggestions for fonts or additions to the list of properties, send us a personal email or talk to us in person.

WSS Engineering

A collection of stuff I think is cool.

I love what I do and I love making a difference through what I do. Seeing someone else smile because of something I did is my greatest goal.

Who am I?

I am Anthony Pizzimenti.

I'm a Java and web engineer from Iowa City, Iowa. For the last year, I've worked freelance, improving my skills in frontend and backend web development as well as software engineering. I now work for the West Side Story as a web developer, IT consultant, and podcast guy.

I don't have a lot of spare time, but when I do, I play ice hockey for the Varsity high school team (also, LGRW!). I like doing crossword puzzles and playing StarCraft II, probably my favorite video game of all time. I also enjoy playing recreational soccer (although I'll be trying out for the school team next year) with my friends and cooking. My friend Louis and I run a podcast called TechTalk, where we discuss recent news surrounding the technological news sphere as well as do a whole portion of the show dedicated to helping people troubleshoot their PC problems on reddit.

My Tools

Brackets, my HTML/CSS/JS editor. With a few added extensions, it (almost) becomes an IDE.
eclipse, my Java IDE. It's a great editor and not TOO too heavy. Easily my favorite feature is auto-building.
Not really a tool, per se, but Chrome is a great browser. I'll post a list of the extensions I use soon enough. Also, the devtools are great.
I use the command line for a lot of stuff. I use Git to organize and publish my work, and as I don't really like the desktop app, I use the command line. I also use SASS as a preprocessor, so I run SASS commands from the command line as well.

I'm Anthony Pizzimenti. I'm a Java and web engineer from Iowa City, Iowa. This is my blog about music, web and software engineering, robotics, dinner parties, and whatever else I can muster. This is the mobile version of the site, so if you want a better experience with more content, visit this page on a computer.

The Simple Blogger theme edited by Anthony Pizzimenti © 2014, 2015.
Full mobile version by Anthony Pizzimenti, © 2015

March 5, 2015

Portfolio

Intro

So for the past couple of days, I've been working on a new project. As I'm applying for a web development/design position at the West Side Story (my school's newsmag), I have to make a portfolio. I submitted my application as soon as it was available, but that was a few weeks back, and I've done much more work since then, and I wanted to showcase it in a simple, clean way.

Code

I thought that having a streamlined, centered design would work well, and in doing so, had to change a few things. Normally, I'm partial to using the float property for making sure that things move together and that they're put into the right place, but for this one I used the display: inline-block property to make sure everything displayed correctly. After using this, everything within the element assigned the inline-block property can be treated as a basic text element, and can be aligned with text-align.

Stylin

I chose two things that I wanted to do in this little simple site. Firstly, I wanted to choose a nice, sans font that would appear somewhat blocky and would look good in bold and underlined. From my usual Google Fonts source, I chose Montserrat, a simple rounded sans font. I enjoy it, and it has really low load times; I want a low load time, since the site should be simple and clean.

The next thing I wanted was to have a hidden element; I chose to use the visibility CSS property to allow for a nice little hover section. I filled it with ideas for what I want to do next year, and it's just as simple and clean as the rest of the site; titles are aligned center and the text is justified, controlled by the text-align: center and text-align: justify properties respectively.

Making it

To complete this project, I went onto blogger and registered a new domain and then went to the HTML edit section of blogger. Then, I deleted the entire 2000-odd line theme and replaced it with the simple, single-page HTML-only document I had written up. Blogger wouldn't allow for a single HTML document, though, and so I had to keep the XML header tag, and the <b:skin></b:skin> and <b:template-skin></b:template-skin> tags. After this, I was able to fully upload the document, all 142 lines of it (/s). It's simple, clean, and very VERY lightweight. If anyone else has to do a portfolio for WSS ever, you can check my Github repository called Portfolio to see how I structured and did everything. It's really nice, and I think it'll make a good impression.
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