Boring text? W.rd

This project is the result of a failed attempt to do something with an API that turned into a successful attempt to do something different with the same API. Still with me? Ok, good.

W.rd

My original plan was to have some fun with a thesaurus API. Although I quickly lost interest in my initial idea (too complicated), I decided to salvage the thesaurus portion and use it in a slightly scaled down, uber pointless project.

Above the radio buttons where it says “Make my…”, the word “boring” (“dull” in the screenshot above) is replaced with synonyms that cycle through every few seconds. I used the BigHugeLabs Thesaurus API to dynamically generate the list of words. The list of synonyms is a combination of all “boring” synonyms, all synonyms of a randomly selected “boring” synonym, and all synonyms of the randomly selected “boring” synonym synonym. Now my mission to set the record for most uses of the word “synonym” in a single paragraph is complete.

Moving on, there are four things you can do to your text.
1. Get rid of some vowels, add a little extra punctuation, and just generally bastardize the spelling.
2. Make it ready for Twitter.
3. Pig Latin for the 21st century.
4. Polish it off with a nice, shiny Boston accent.

If you don’t follow directions, I’ll let you know. And if you can’t find the button, promptly make an appointment with your eye doctor.

Once I had all the API stuff working (looking up synonyms), I wanted to cram in a few more things. Up first was getting rid of ugly default radio buttons and styling my own (courtesy of ScrewDefaultButtons). Throw in some tooltips and CSS shadows and gradients and call it a day.

View the final result here.