Ed's Blog

AvaTint Launched!

The site very simply takes your avatar and turns it into any color you select. The online community is starting to do this to support and protest many things. This is the 2.0 way of making your page background black for a cause.

We created this site in 90 minutes using Django on June 19th.

I got home from dinner and noticed that some twitter icons were coming in green. This caught my attention because I had suggested yellow to protest Obama's massive government spending a few days earlier. I mentioned this to Rudy Menendez (yes related) and suggested it would be useful for the less tech savvy to create a page to change an avatar's color. We knew the Pyhon package PIL could do this and Rudy found jscolor as a color selection tool. Together we created and deployed this application.

The timeline is roughtly as follows:

  • 12:25am CT Floated the idea to Rudy via IM
  • 12:30am CT Created local proof of concept that PIL could handle it
  • 12:35am CT Created local project diretory
  • 12:38am CT Download jscolor
  • 12:56am CT Registered domain
  • 1:14am CT Rudy jokes about test scripts
  • 2:00am CT Start deploy to production server and test
  • 2:10am CT Decide to switch databases to MySQL (and mock that we need a DB at all)
  • 2:30am CT Live

If anyone is interested in helping maintain and enhance the site, please contact me or Rudy.