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Comment by vinhboy | Hacker News Reader

I am always impressed by how nice these libraries are presented. Great font, beautiful color scheme, pretty layout, etc... It's hard enough for me to write some good code, let alone write some good code then build a beautiful landing page for it. Is there some sort of template service everyone uses that I don't know about? Or do you guys just take a lot of time building these presentation pages because it's part of writing great code?

In fact. I would venture to say one of the best indicator for the quality a library or plugin, is how well it's presented in html.

Does anyone else notice this?

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Glad you like it, thanks!

The homepage for this and the exchange rates API was designed in-browser, i had a lot of time on my hands thanks to two back-to-back 8 hour flights.

Naturally it's based on the HTML5 boilerplate (http://www.html5boilerplate.com) - HTML done by hand, but if there is a template service, I'd love to know about it.

The colours are mostly taken from Solarized Dark colour scheme and modified a bit: (http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized)

And the sandbox demo console is something i threw together just for this but released on github (http://josscrowcroft.github.com/javascript-sandbox-console/)

PS The robot (currencybot) came from http://robohash.org using the text 'CurrencyBot' :)

Interesting you say this. I totally agree, and I have had a 'back burner' idea for the past year or so now of creating a simple template generator for libraries/such projects. I really need to start working through that list! :-)

That sounds like a laugh - would love to help out if poss, let's talk it out!

I think its just representative of the creators passion for the work being created. If one is to spend a good amount of time and effort in the creation of a library, and they feel its as good as it should be, then it follows that it deserves good presentation. So I agree, but I can imagine it helps to be a competent creative[1], to pull off a good presentation.

[1]: in the loose sense of the word.

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