Placeholder text with flair! Introducing The Kwisatz Haderach

It’s pretty silly, and wasted more time than I needed to, but I’m really very incredibly “oh my god I’m so sick of this I could puke” bored with Lorem Ipsum text. You know what I’m talking about, that placeholder text you use when you just need to fill a paragraph with something, and don’t feel like typing shaesthstnsahoestha?

This:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

It’s a damn useful thing to developers and programmers, but it’s just so freakin boring!

Well, recently I was reading (for about the 7th time) the Dune series and saw words like Jacurutu and Muad’dib and thought “That would make fun Lorem Ipsum text.” Then, because Ruby and Rails makes building a web application about as easy as making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I got to work.

Kwisatz Haderach

Instead of Lorem Ipsum, I created Kwisatz Haderach.¹ Unbelievably, the domain hadera.ch was free, which is cool, because with a subdomain it becomes http://kwisatz.hadera.ch.

Instead of random latin-looking text that doesn’t mean anything, the site generates paragraphs of text from words in various Science Fiction and Fantasy universes. Here’s a sample pulling from the Dune and Doctor Who universes:

Suk hajra Bela Tegeuse liban maula TARDIS Tabr Harkonnen plasteel butlerian suk sadus crysknife fai caid Poritrin gom jabbar dalek Faufreluches crysknife sirat baradye. Minimic Film Palimbasha Arrakeen Irulan Panoplia Propheticus kitab al-ibar wali kulon Lankiveil Alia Muad’dib.

Nothing Special

It’s nothing spectacular, barely worthy even of a blog post. It’s nothing that an experienced Rails developer couldn’t do in about 30 minutes, and a novice Rails developer in about 2 hours.

But it’s one of those cool ideas that you think about, and might never get around to actually building. It’s just for fun. Much more fun than stupid Lorem Ipsum.

So go check it out, and if you want to, you can throw together a quick wordlist for a universe of your choosing. Some great ones to have would be Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek, even things like Fraggle Rock. Wikipedia even has a great List of Fictional Universes² if you want to see some fun ones you may have forgotten about.

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1. for those who don’t know Dune, here’s a reference. [↩]
2. Thanks to @wajiii for that pointer! [↩]

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