A few weeks ago, I met with Grant Van Gameren. This was the first time I had met him, but definitely not the first time I had tasted his tongue. You see, Grant Van Gameren is the co-owner and chef at The Black Hoof, and his Tongue on Brioché is quite easily the best thing I’ve ever eaten.

As much as I wanted to indulge in bone marrow and foie gras, this meeting was strictly business.

Currently, Grant is using his blog, Charcuterie Sundays, as the main online presence for The Black Hoof. Looking to move from Blogspot to WordPress, we talked about a few options. After a lot of discussion, we figured out that developing an entirely new website with blog integration would be the best option. A quick call to John Thai, and 10 minutes later we’re onboard for doing a complete design and build for The Black Hoof.

Really fucking cool, right?

After brainstorming with John for a few hours, I can say I’m really, really , really excited for this one. We’ve got some great ideas and Grant seems to be really into them. Amazing!

In the spring of 2009, I started a small project to help build my Javascript skills, and you know what? It’s kinda almost sorta completed – but not really. I wanted to make things extremely difficult challenge myself to learn the basics of Javascript, without the help of libraries and thought that creating a slider puzzle would be a great thing to build.

I’ve been fairly eager to share this project with everyone, and had planned on waiting until it was fully complete, but I started thinking that it would be interesting to document the project in stages.

Here’s the first iteration.

First thing you’ll notice, yeah it’s kind of backwards.

Some things I want to have in the future:

• Randomization of the pieces onload aka works the way it should
• Some sort of “Hurrah” message if you complete the puzzle
• Fancy-pants animations
• Some sort of easter egg involving cats or zombies

I also want it to be fairly customizable and accommodate different sized images, variable grids, completion messages etc. Once I get all these features implemented I’ll post the code and you guys can do what you will with it :D

Works in IE6 – 8, Firefox 3, Safari 3… still need to check it in Opera and Chrome.