Tag Archives: coding

Talk Like Warren Ellis

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A few weeks ago, I called my friend Miles and asked him to help me out with the programming on a project I dreamed up. Here’s how I put it to him:

Scott: “I want you to help me with a project that will either get no attention at all, or a ton. [pause to build anticipation] Talk Like Warren Ellis dot-com.”

Miles: “Oh, awesome.”

In case you’re not familiar, Warren Ellis is the famed author behind comics likeTransmetropolitan,Planetary and the novelCrooked Little Vein. He is famous on the internet for posting horrifying images of body modification on his blog and has one of the most popular Twitter feeds on the network.

On Twitter, he frequently signs on for the day by saying something along the lines of “Good morning, my little lovegoats of the internet!” Because he posts this kind of thing frequently, I had the idea that we could construct a random warren-ellis-ism generator by compiling list of vocabulary words and parsing his grammar.

Miles got excited because he had tried something similar in college with a James Bond movie title generator, and had some ideas for how to improve the coding.

After a lot of scrolling through Warren’s twitter archives and debating the finer points of Warren Ellis Grammar, Miles delivered the final code to me, and now you can enjoy the results at TalkLikeWarrenEllis.com.

The day I posted it, it only got traffic from people I know, but we made it this morning. Right before I went to lunch, Warren signed into Twitter and said “Back from holiday. Who requires punishment?”

I replied “Welcome back! While you were gone, I made this:” and added a link to the site. Then I went to lunch, hoping that he might see it in the flood of replies he certainly gets.

When I came back from lunch, the site was getting a bunch of traffic. Turns out he saw it:

Warren Ellis Noticed Us!

Dude, I Rule

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“I’m a strong believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule.”
– Randall inClerks

That about sums up how I feel right now. When I set up KillingMachines.org, it was the first time I had ever put up a website with a clear goal in mind. And not just a goal, but a list of them. I wanted nothing less than to write the best weblog site available. I had been to livejournal and blogger and was unimpressed. FCS could do most of what they did, and what it couldn’t do was made up for by the fact that it didn’t suck like they did. Who wants to pay to use a weblog site? And haven’t these people ever heard of databases? Why on earth are they ftp’ing the blog entries?

And so I wrote my manifesto. KillingMachines would become, with Steve’s help, and building on the base of FCS, the site I imagined. Users would be able to completely skin their journals. They could set their account to be either a personal journal, or a forum where everyone could post. They would automatically receive a subdomain for their journal. They could turn replies on and off. Most of these features were just pipe dreams at the time, but Steve helped me out a lot, and we got the site up and running, and eventually, only two major features were missing: User-defined skins for journals, and the ability to set an account to be either forum or journal.

I’m pleased to announce that I have finally gotten these features working, and KillingMachines is now FEATURE COMPLETE. I’ve got a few more tricks up my sleeve, but basically the site has everything it needs to be the best weblog site ever. I’m extremely proud of it, and I genuinely believe that given time, word of mouth will turn KMorg into a weblog powerhouse on the web!

And as if that wasn’t cool enough, something else is going my way! Recently, I got the idea in my head that it might be nice to have a Macintosh. The germ behind this idea is osX. This fine operating system is really fun to play with, and the fact that it’s built on a base of BSD makes it hard for me to resist. However, I’m not about to ditch my PC for a mac. I just like the idea of having one around to play with. As a result, I couldn’t justify spending $700 for a new one. Just today, I was mentioning to Annie that if I could find an iMac for around $300, I would probably buy it.

Well, today I may have found one. I’ve been talking with the owner, and she’s been looking to offload her old blueberry G3 iMac 333Mhz. I offered her $250, and things are looking good. Pretty soon, I might have a nice little mac sitting on my desk, waiting for me to grab a copy of osX!