A good friend of mine sent a link to this great web site called Wordle that allows you to build word-images from a web page, a block of text, or any RSS/Atom capable blog or URL.
My blog looks like this:
So…apparently I talk about DATA, VISUAL and STYLE a fair bit.
It also looks like this:
And this:
…but all I see is a potato!?
A good read on the approach (at 30,000 feet) and a bunch of background are on the site. As a .Net developer I sigh a little when comments like this are made:
This would have been completely impossible without the Java platform. (source)
There are actually many ways to do this, .Net certainly not the only alternative to Java. Any development platform that allows access to font metrics would allow for something similar to be developed. I don’t mean to trivialize the work done here, nor to turn to a Java versus .Net debate, the point is that many languages and environments (Flash output from c++ cgi running on Apache, for example) could render similar - if not the same - results.
That said, this is very cool work from a bright mind.
I found that site a long time ago, then re-discovered it when I was cleaning out my bookmarks folder. You gotta love the fact that there are so many possible ways to code something, but in the end it gets you the same place... kind of reminds me of something else I'm involved in...
ReplyDeleteheheh...too true, good friend. too true.
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