matt.west.co.tt

Tonight I’m thrilled to be able to bring you an exclusive first glimpse of Are Great Things Born, the forthcoming album from Glencoe Horse.

…okay, so that’s a lie. Glencoe Horse (and their album) are a figment of random chance, generated by the following fiendishly complicated algorithm as introduced by Burr on the FAWM forum:

• The band’s name comes from the title of a random Wikipedia article
• The song title is taken from the last four words (give or take a couple) of the last quote that shows up on the random quotations page at, um, The Quotations Page
• The cover art is the third photo that comes up in Flickr’s random selection of interesting photos from the last 7 days

A general call went out to come up with an automatic online generator, and, well, how could I resist? My first attempt at an application in Camping (chosen so that I could take advantage of the wonderful HTML-parsing capabilities of Hpricot without the monster truck of Rails sitting underneath), it took about 3 hours to complete starting from no knowledge of the framework whatsoever, of which half was taken up finding out the best way to deploy it.

It lacks the human touch of the lovingly-photoshopped artworks that have previously come out of this concept (and replaces it with some rather horrific random colour schemes instead) but it’s still a curiously addictive way to pass a few minutes, with your finger poised over the Refresh key.

• Album Cover Generator

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 9:56 pm and is filed under FAWM, Hacks, Music, Ruby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.