I'm turning 30 tomorrow so I figured I'd make something birthday related. A friend of mine came up with the idea and I coded it all up. The frosting is generated dynamically using the PHP GD library and a lot of image convolution matrices. And if you're wondering, yes the web 2.0 logo and cheesy graphics are intentional. I thought it would be more fun this way.
Cartoon shows are vividly pro-consumption: Simpsons has beer and crusty burgers; Futurama has alcohol; Spongebob has Krabby Patty burgers. Though often joked about, they are always seen being enjoyably consumed. This makes the shows very appealing to a TV network, because they are very appealing to advertisers of consumables.
When viewing your website, I couldn't help but think how delicious some cake would be right now. So. Let adsense do its work, showing local cake-delivery bakeries that provide a web-customizable text service (assuming they exist - if not, there's a business there too.)
Also, do support unicode, as someone suggested, also for reddit-inspired workplace friday cakes, such as: ಠ_ಠ
This is why I love the Internet. I didn't even think about different Unicode characters and symbols. I whipped up the entire site in 2 days (most of it was spent tweaking the different frosting colors) and haven't even put it through my regular barrage of tests. I'll try to get Unicode working tomorrow, it mostly has to do with the specific font I used. Maybe I can give a few more font-choices. Also, I could auto-size the font according to the length of text.
I try UTF characters in everything which displays text, especially when it's graphically manipulated. It's slightly amazing how few handle it, even if there's little reason not to (unless a library along the pipeline only reads ASCII).
I think it's just that most people are used to dealing with / have encountered C char arrays, and 8 bits per character just makes sense to programmers. 'Tis why I jump for joy when I hear about framework-X fully supporting UTF - IMO, they all should, from day one, but I realize it can sometimes be a lot of work, and is always a performance hit.
You don't know how right you are. Google Web Toolkit has the most impressive support for Arabic, but it's ASCII only out of the box, even though it runs on Java, a thorough-bred Unicode language.
SELECT BOWL FROM CABINET FULL JOIN EGGS ON COUNTER WITH MIXER, FULL JOIN FLOUR ON COUNTER WITH MIXER, FULL JOIN SUGAR ON COUNTER WITH MIXER WHERE CHEF IS NOT NULL; UPDATE OVEN SET TEMP = F(450); INSERT INTO OVEN VALUES CAKE AFTER REMOVE FREAKIN_TRAY FROM OVEN WITH MITT; BAKE CAKE; REMOVE CAKE WHERE CAKE = BAKED; DROP CAKE; REMOVE CAKE WHERE CAKE ON FLOOR WHERE FIVE_SECOND_RULE = TRUE; CROSS APPLY ICING(RED) AS DECORATION; CUT CAKE; SELECT SLICE(LARGE) AS "PIECE" FROM CAKE AND EAT("PIECE");
The above example makes the text look too small though, IMHO. Maybe scale things up dynamically to fit the text to the available space a little better? Still, very neat toy.
