Oh hai! I’ve been working an a rather unusual project, a website, actually: Daring Furball (http://daringfurball.org), a translation of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball into LOLspeak. It gets updated once an hour (no feed, yet). Read it and enjoy. Let’s hope Gruber keeps on using “jiminy” as I quite like the LOLspeak translation.

It all started about a month ago when I accidentally typed “daringfurball” into my browser. I got a nice chuckle and told my wife about it. Immediately, the topic of LOLcats came up. We make a daily routine of reading I Can Has Cheezburger? together at the end of the day to ease the stress, so this wasn’t a big stretch. From LOLcats, conversation veered towards LOLspeak, the language of the LOLcat. Then we got the idea. Wouldn’t it be cool to translate Daring Fireball into LOLspeak? OMGWTFBBQ!

This was also just before I was to give a presentation on Apple’s PubSub framework for PSIG. I thought it would be a cool demonstration to use PubSub to pull the DF feed, translate it to LOLspeak, and then regenerate the HTML. Sure enough, it made for a nice demo of PubSub and RubyCocoa. I chose Ruby due to it’s regular expressions and the Erubis templating engine. After the presentation, many PSIGers helped me with the Daring Furball logo. In all it was a lot of fun.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. I’m open sourcing the dictionary and the Ruby back-end and it’ll be available as a Ruby gem. I’ll talk more about that in a future article, though. kthxbye!