Check out http://lolfiction.com/
This was a major fun project. I had just finished my first full stack web project, and for the first time in my life I wrote PHP, MySQL, CSS, AJAX in addition to HTML. I was new to web development, and I barely had a grasp on any of it at all. But I loved it. Despite not knowing jQuery, or much of CSS, my next project was more-or-less a success that still lives to this day!
I’ve always loved add-libs. You know, those books for kids where you fill out words on a form, then later replace them into a story and proceed to laugh for hours. After having been enlightened with databases, dynamic websites, ajax, etc. I came up with the perfect application: crowd-sourced adlibs!
Here’s the idea: the website would have a basic text editor that would allow users to insert keywords into stories. The users could join the website, save, and share their stories. Each user-generator story would automatically generate a word-form complete with parts-of-speech labels on the inputs. Users would enter the words into the form and it would automatically populate the story.
But that’s just the beginning – every time a form is filled out, the words the user entered would be saved into a database, sorted by part-of-speech. Words could be up-voted or down-voted giving them a popularity rating. If users didn’t want to fill out the form, they could instead fill out a story automatically. The most popular words be available in the database to auto-fill any story. This dynamic created a new way to to enjoy adlibs. If you write your own story, it’s not very fun to fill out – you already know where the worlds will go. But if you write your own story, and let the collective conscious of the Internet fill it out for you, often the results were hilarious.
After several years, I started rewriting this website with everything that I had learned in the years between. Unfortunately that version doesn’t exist yet. Recently I’ve been studying Ruby and I want to reboot this project with a proper Ruby on Rails backend. The idea of this excites me a lot. Other than using it as the perfect excuse for learning RoR, I would also like to learn to implement a RESTful API and built apps to go with it. Hopefully soon…
Check out http://lolfiction.com/
June 3, 2014 at 3:36 pm | Websites