It is William Shakespeare’s 450th birthday and it is high time to tell the world about quotemash.com. A little homegrown website and exercise in creativity that I came up with just after quitting my advertising job in Mumbai. What started out as a little experiment to push my coding and creative skills, turned into a unique digital property in itself to while away your time with the mechanics of randomness.
In my many meanderings around the internet, I came across a little piece of code that I thought had a lot of creative potential. The code in question is called the WTF engine. This open source software pulls data from columns in a Google doc sheet or a JSON file. The code then goes on to combine data based on a simple formula that the user creates and displays the resulting string on a HTML page.
The examples of sites using this code already revolved around word substitution in pre-defined sentences. Why not then, I thought, use the code to create strings of randomly created sentences. But what would make this mix up of sentences creative and amusing. I struck upon the contrast of Shakespearean dialogue and some of the most famous dialogues known to man due to the silver tongues on the silver screen. A mix of the bard’s best with the best movie quotes of all time. And thus quotemash was born.
It may be said that celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday with this site would probably make the bard role in his grave. But I think its fun nonetheless. Check it out here.
Update: Due to a change in the way google names its google docs (or so I think) the site has stopped working. Might think of shortening the list of possible combinations and get it up and running later.