generator posts

Kanye West apology generator - Time Waster

by Jay Hathaway Sep 17th 2009

To appreciate the Kanye West apology generator, you may need some background: by now you've probably heard about rapper Kanye West's outburst at the Video Music Awards, interrupting teenage country star Taylor Swift as she accepted an award. Even if you don't have a TV, I'll bet you've noticed that "interrupting Kanye" has gone viral, and it's almost unavoidable on the web. While Kanye's stunt is kind of played out as a joke already, his blogged (but quickly deleted) apology to Taylor Swift is a more fertile comedy goldmine.

Kanye's propensity for blogging in all caps is already mildly hilarious, but when you combine that with a heat-of-the-moment defense of his actions -- written and posted while he was still at the awards that night -- you've got something really special. All you need to do is fill in the required fields, Mad Libs style. No description I could write would do justice to Kanye's original post, so I'll just present this apology I generated for some of Download Squad's lead bloggers:

I'M SOOOOO SORRY TO GRANT ROBERTSON AND VICTOR AGREDA, JR. FOR WRITING THE POST. I SPOKE TO VICTOR AGREDA, JR. RIGHT AFTER. GRANT ROBERTSON IS VERY UPSET !!........... I'M IN THE WRONG FOR POSTING AND DELETING!!!!!! I'M SORRY TO MY FANS IF I LET YOU GUYS DOWN!!!!! I'M SORRY TO MY FRIENDS AT DOWNLOAD SQUAD. I WILL APOLOGIZE TO GRANT ROBERTSON 2MRW. WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD!!!! EVERYBODY WANNA BOOOOO ME BUT I'M A FAN OF BLOG!!! Y'ALL KNOW!!! BOOOOYAAAWWWWW!!!!!!! AIGHT I GAVE MY APP TO MIKE ARRINGTON WHEN THEY DESERVED IT... THAT'S WHAT IT IS!!!!!!!!!! I'M NOT CRAZY YALL, I'M JUST BEING REAL. SORRY FOR THAT!!!MUCH RESPECT!!!!!

It probably won't be as funny next week, when this whole thing is ancient history, so strike while the iron is hot. Post your own Kanye Apology in the comments.

Tags: apology, generator, kanye west, KanyeWest, MTV, time waster, TimeWaster, VMAS

Filed under: Design, Utilities, web 2.0

Make shiny buttons at Da Button Factory

by Jay Hathaway Mar 16th 2009

If you need a button the web in a pinch, Da Button Factory has you covered. It's a quick and easy "shiny" button generator with lots of custom options that are easy to control. You can change colors, fonts, shadow effects and borders with a few clicks, and there's a gallery of decent-looking example buttons to get you started.

The main problem with Da Button Factory is the limited font selection. You can match every other element up with the design of your site reasonably well, but with only a handful of typefaces to choose from, it's hard to get the font you want. However, Da Button Factory scores points for ease of use and the ability to export as a CSS background.

Tags: buttons, generator, shiny, web2.0

Filed under: Fun, Freeware, Time-Wasters, Web

Create random album covers - Time Waster

by Jason Clarke Mar 9th 2009

Creating compelling album cover art requires talent, though when I look through my old CD collection (how quaint!) it's pretty clear that talent is not a prerequisite for everyone who creates album covers. For a fun comparison, check out how surprisingly well My Album Generator creates passable album covers.

The formula is simple: choose to use either a random Wikipedia article or a simple adjective + noun for the name of your band, and a recent random photo from either Flickr or Photobucket. Currently album titles are pulled from quotationspage.com. Lastly, choose whether you want to create a "Metal" band album cover, the only effect of which appears to be adding umlauts over vowels randomly.

It takes only a few seconds to try, and you'll probably end up with a few good ones rather quickly. Here are a couple of my favorites: Spectral Mandible, Peoria Panorama, Puffy Jello, and Buddy Liles.

Gallery: My Album Generator

Tags: album, album-art, album-art-generator, album-cover, album-generator, generator

Filed under: Web

Make a custom tag graphic with TinyTag

by Jay Hathaway Nov 26th 2008

If you need a punchy visual element to spruce up your website, you might consider TinyTag. The holiday season is nearly upon us (check out the gift guides we've been posting here on Download Squad), so 'tis the season for colorful tags. TinyTag makes it really easy to generate one. Enter your text, choose a color, size and alignment, and that's it.

Try line-breaking the text of your tag to adjust the size of each word. Once you've got it right, you can export to Flickr or Imageshack, and use the tag wherever you want. The simplicity of TinyTag is also its downfall, in a way. It would be nice to have more colors and typefaces available. Fortunately, the tags look pretty good as they are.

Tags: generator, image, text, TinyTag

Filed under: Utilities, Blogging, Productivity

Making comparison charts is easy with Tablefy

by Jay Hathaway Jun 24th 2008

Making a point-by-point comparison chart is a pain in the butt. It requires fiddling with spreadsheets, formatting lots of individuals cells and hoping the results are easy to read. Tablefy takes all the mess out of comparing things. Just put in your data and it'll do the rest. You can even embed pictures and YouTube videos with little fuss.

The example charts look sharp and professional, and there are some neat little auto-formatting quirks that save you time. If you're doing a comparison that uses a lot of "yes" and "no" -- a feature comparison between two apps, for example -- Tablefy will automatically color the yes and no cells for you, making them easier to distinguish. Although the charts are made to be embedded on your own site, there are lots of examples to browse and vote on at the Tablefy site.

[via Webware]

Tags: chart, compare, comparison, generator, spreadsheet, Tablefy

Filed under: Utilities, Blogging, Productivity, Web services

Poll Authority: hey, poll anyone you want!

by Jay Hathaway Jun 23rd 2008

Poll Authority is an easy poll-creation service that generates nice tidy multiple-choice polls you can paste into your website or blog. A lot of blogging services and social networks have their own polling systems, but as far as the platform-neutral free poll generators go, Poll Authority looks pretty decent.

With the free version, you get unlimited polls and a bit of customization in terms of appearance. Upgrading to the $5 or $8 monthly plans doesn't actually seem to do much, other than adding a bit of professionalism by replacing the Poll Authority link on each poll with a customized one. The Gold plan gets you a breakdown of your results by geographic area. Bottom line: if you're looking for a fast, easy way to make a poll, and you don't want it to cost you anything, Poll Authority is a good bet.

[via Life Rocks! 2.0]

Tags: generator, poll, Poll Authority, PollAuthority, polling, tools

Filed under: Design, Fun

Viscosity: award-winning abstract image generator

by Jay Hathaway Mar 12th 2008

Geeks aren't always the best artists, but there are plenty of ways to use technology to get around that and create some stylish graphics. One of the easiest of these is Viscosity, winner of the Best Art award at this year's SXSW. We would have posted this sooner, but we were having too much fun playing with this satisfyingly simple little app.

Your Viscosity image starts out as 9 shaded horizontal stripes, but a few clicks will make it bloom into a multi-colored, semi-transparent, almost sculptural piece of transcendent web-stuff. We put together this attractive blob in Download Squad's color scheme in a matter of minutes. We're sure you can do better than we can, too.

Viscosity has just a few controls. You can slide your brushes from mushy to angular, and change sizes, colors and opacities, but that's about it. It's a basic interface that produces unexpectedly complex results.

Tags: generator, graphics, illustrations, viscosity

Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet, Utilities, News, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, Web services, Freeware

Wordpress theme generator

by Ryan Carter Apr 30th 2007

Yvoschaap.com is a simple, easy-as-a-web-form way to generate your own color-coded wordpress theme, complete with standard options for sidebar placement and width, site name, logo URL, body width, color scheme, text scheme, the ability to add a third column to your theme and even insert-able Creative Commons and generic copyright text in the footer.

What used to take a fair bit of time -- tweaking and prodding a Wordpress theme to get everything just right -- now requires much less brain-power. Generated themes are handed to you on a sexy zip-file platter and are WordPress 2.1, WP widget and Yahoo UI compatible, not to mention it should work on any "A-grade" browser, sweet!

Tags: blog, design, developer, generator, theme, wordpress, WP

Filed under: Internet, Security, Web services

SuperGenPass, Simple Password Generator to the rescue

by Chris Gilmer Mar 6th 2007

Creating a new secure password for websites you visit everyday and having to remember them is such a pain, but it doesn't have to be. Do you use the same password for every website you visit? Thats not a very secure thing to do, a unique password for each site you visit is the most reliable way to keep yourself safe. SuperGenPass is a browser bookmarklet that will use your master password to create secure passwords for each different website you use throughout the day, and you don't even have to remember them.

SuperGenPass is a snippet of JavaScript code that is stored in your browser as a bookmark, no install necessary. How does it work? When you are signing up for a new service, enter your master password into the password field on the website. Select the SuperGenPass bookmarklet and follow the instructions to show or populate the new secure password generated from the JavaScript code. The process is simple, but is it secure? The code isn't sitting on any website, it's in your browser as a JavaScript string.Trusting this code is another issue, what happens if for some odd reason the bookmarklet becomes corrupt? Bye Bye secure password. It does come up with secure looking alphanumeric passwords based on what I typed in for my password, so as far as that goes its secur-ish. I would prefer to write it down, for that extra precaution.

[via GoogleSystem]

Tags: bookmark, bookmarklet, gen, generator, javascript, password, secure, supergenpass

Filed under: Audio, Utilities, Windows, Apple, Freeware

The Filter for iTunes: "Better than shuffle"

by Jordan Running Oct 11th 2006

The Filter boasts quite a lot. Its tagline is "creates perfect playlists from your iTunes library," and its web site says it's "better than your shuffle button!" What The Filter is is a plugin for iTunes (Windows version only for now, Mac coming soon) that generates playlists when you select a few songs and click on the big black "F" button. Like many programs, The Filter claims to excel at building playlists based on your mood. I gave The Filter a try and found that it's actually not too shabby. I selected a few songs that I thought would go well together in a playlist and it filled out the rest of the playlist with songs that fit in pretty well. While not every one was one that I would have picked myself, none of them seemed out of place, and after all, The Filter touts its ability to help you rediscover music that you'd all but forgotten you had. Like Pandora and other services, The Filter learns from your listening habits and tweaks your playlist based on which tracks you skip and which ones you listen to all the way through. I've tried a number of products that claim to do what The Filter does, but most of them either didn't work very well or were far too complex. The Filter is the first one that really seems both smart enough and simple enough to really give a shot.

Tags: filter, free, freeware, generator, itunes, music, playlist, the filter, TheFilter, windows

Filed under: Utilities, Video, Web services

YouTube video badge for your blog

by Jordan Running Oct 11th 2006

Intrepid hacker Harper Reed, who works for Threadless company skinnyCorp by day (and whom I had the pleasure of going to college with), has released a cool YouTube badge maker. It's a simple web-based tool that will generate a badge for your web site, blog, or MySpace page that shows thumbnails for your six most recent YouTube videos. Since the badge it generates is just a PNG image rather than, say, a Flash or Ajax widget, you can use it just about anywhere. All you do is enter your YouTube username and paste the generated HTML snippet into your web site and you're ready to go. Reed has some other useful tools and toys at flashandburn.net, including a similarly handy Flickr badge generator.

Tags: badge, flickr, generator, harper reed, HarperReed, myspace, video, youtube

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Freeware

Use Google gadgets in the OS X Dashboard

by Jordan Running Oct 6th 2006

The other day Chris Gilmer reported that it's now possible to embed Google gadgets intended for Google Personalized Home on any web page. A company called Mesa Dynamics has capitalized on this ability with a free utility called Amnesty Generator, which lets you use any Google web gadget on Apple's Dashboard. All you have to do is copy the gadget's HTML code from Google and paste it into the program, and a brand new widget is created for you. Hooray for wrappers. Mesa also makes a couple other free Dashboard-related apps that let you run Dashboard widgets as stand-alone apps or a screen saver.

Tags: amnesty, amnestygenerator, apple, dashboard, gadgets, generator, google, mesadynamics, osx, widgets

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Browser Tips

Widgetize: Opera widget generator

by Jordan Running Jul 31st 2006

Opera Software has launched Widgetize, a web-based wizard that will help you create a widget for Opera 9 in three simple steps. Currently Widgetize only allows you to make RSS feed widgets, but offers some customization. You can choose between "Advanced" and "Classic" widgets, and there's many attractive themes to work with. Once you've created your widget, Widgetize gives you a link as well as various code for sharing your widget on your web site or forums.

Tags: generator, opera, opera9, widgetize, widgets

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Web services, Social Software

Flickr Profile Widget banner generator

by David Chartier Jul 23rd 2006

Here is yet another Flickr toy to add to your arsenal, hailing from flagrantdisregard.com's extensive Flickr Toys section: the Flickr Profile Widget banner generator. You have a nice array of options to specify, such as which of your photos to show (most recent, most interesting, random recent, random interesting), and you can chose whether to show the photo count I have pictured here. As expected, you can also specify the background's color, as well as the username text color. It all comes together to generate a slick banner image that measures 500 x 100 (I had to downsize mine per Download Squad formatting specifications), complete with just a touch of drop shadow. Nice.

[via electicism]

Tags: banner, code, Flickr, generator, image, images, photos, picture, profile, profile widget, ProfileWidget

Filed under: Internet, Web services

Automatically generate .htaccess files

by Jordan Running May 26th 2006

If you're asking, "WTF is .htaccess," this might not be the post for you, but I'll tell you anyway: .htaccess are little configuration files for the Apache web server that let you apply simple or very complex rules to the way requests are handled. Now, I know people who can write .htaccess files blindfolded, but for me it's always a big headache. Enter .htaccess Generator, that does what it sounds like: it writes .htaccess files for you. It's a simple, though long, web form that helps you do everything from password protect a directory to specify rewrite rules. Of course, it doesn't do everything, but for basic tasks it seems like it could be a lifesaver.

[Via Lifehacker]

Tags: apache, generator, htaccess

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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generator posts

Kanye West apology generator - Time Waster

Make shiny buttons at Da Button Factory