Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Random or Written?

Woah, apologies for throwing 'poetry' at you there without any warning messages...

I'm planning to update the 'Poematic' feature of this site slightly. To make for more variety, I'm planning to randomly plant pre-scripted texts in amongst the randomly generated ones. Phase one of this has just been implemented... The Poematic feature now dynamically generates a page of 'fridge magnet word tiles' (henceforth FMWTs) from a single variable within the ActionScript code. This seems to work OK.

The next phase will be to build a small library of texts (yikes, more poetry!) then re-instate the random poetry generator too. On a random basis the visitor to the site will either be confronted by a digital poem or a humanly generated one. Clicking on any word will probably take the visitor to further digitally created texts. Maybe later, keywords that I've bothered to write accompanying text for will trigger the apropriate pre-scripted work.

For the forseeable future the pre-scripted texts will be variables embedded in the action script code, but I'd be keen to learn how these might be stored as text files server-side; the ultimate aim being to allow site visitors to contribute words or texts to the library for generating the FMWTs.

Ultimately, the goal would be a whole bunch of dynamically-created / partially random, partially hand-made web pages endlessly interlinked with each other for a truly non-linear user experience.

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