November 30, 2008

This idea back-fired on me, literally, and I’m moving on now:

This style of writing is loosely based on the ANSI writing we used to do in the early 90s. Only today we don’t have ANSI and consequently there’s way more code required. Isn’t it amazing how simple stuff gets so complicated?

Our solution back then was a program called TheDraw, this allowed us to write in flames. Well, it was faster to use TheDraw than to code every letter by hand. It was fun then and I’m sure it will be fun for people far into the future. This is sure to be popular, I can’t believe I’m giving this idea away!!! ;-)

In this example I used CSS. CSS is more complicated than ANSI but it’s also a lot more flexible. Back in the ANSI days we couldn’t resize letters. Notice in this example I gradually step down the size of letters in longer words to simulate how flames taper to a tip! This is just part of the algorithm, I’m not crazy enough to style each letter individually! But if you are, go right ahead!

The plan originally? A writing generator for Myspace comments. Only problem is, Myspace blocks most of my code. The other problem here, you’ll notice the fire animation doesn’t loop forever. I was going to fix that before I discovered this doesn’t work on Myspace.

But, if you want to you can still salvage this idea. And I’m going to tell you how to do it. Am I a nice guy or what? Actually, I’m giving this idea away because I have two totally new (unrelated) ideas and won’t have time to continue developing this idea. Have at it!

First, you might want to register some of the relevant domain names. I would register them myself but like I said, I have other ideas I’m working on. Some of these might be registered already, let me know what you come up with:

“fire writing” firewriting.com
“flame writing” flamewriting.com
“fire writer” firewriter.com
“flame writer” flamewriter.com
“write in fire” writeinfire.com
“write in flames” writeinflames.com
“write flames” writeflames.com
“write fire” writefire.com
“flame letters” flameletters.com
“flame words” flamewords.com
“fire letters” fireletters.com
“fire words” firewords.com
“fire generator” firegenerator.com
“fire writing generator”
“flame writing generator”
“fire letter generator”
“fire letters generator”
“flame letter generator”
“flame letters generator”

Seems like I could do that all day, right?

Anyway, now that you have some good domains, now you’re going to need some graphics. Here’s the tedious part. You’re going to want 26 animated letters, that’s 26 files! If you want uppercase too that’s going to cost you 52 files. To make matters more complicated, you probably want them all to be .GIF animated. Now you’re thinking: How am I going to .GIF animate all those files? Here’s some options:

1. Do them all by hand. It might take you forever but if you have that kind of patience you might come up with really incredible effects. You could make the letter “i” look like a candle with a little flame coming up at the top. You could synchronize the movement of the flames to make it look like there’s a small breeze blowing over the letters, use your imagination.

2. The fastest way to do it? Don’t animate the letters at all, just surround the letters with fire. Insert the same little fire animation between words where you might put a space. Not as cool but the letters might appear to be on fire. If you’re thinking: I could do this with CSS, don’t bother, I already tried it, Myspace blocks it!

3. Find a tool to “batch process” your letter images from a command prompt. The trick will be to find a tool that will batch process .gif animations. If you’re a UNIX guru this might be the way to go.

4. Find a graphics program w/ a macro system and/or a scripting language. If you know your graphics program inside and out, this might be the way to go. In fact, you could use the same script to generate all the letter graphics too. Something like this: open-file, draw-letter, shift-hue-to-red, paste-flame-animation, save.

If you’re driven enough you can do it. Or outsource the work to one of those freelance marketplaces.

Now you have all the graphics, you’re going to need a PHP script. The PHP script should take a textarea and convert the text into graphics. I’m not going to explain how you do this, you can figure it out yourself. There’s going to be three sections: textarea, preview, code. Now get to work! If your script goes viral, congrats! Let me know, we can trade links!

In closing, it’s too bad Myspace blocks so many codes. This is their one strength and they’re totally blowing it.