Written on 8/28/2014 in Web development

Last week (11-08-2014), a great man died. Robin Williams, known for roles in 'Ms Doubtfire', 'Dead poets society', 'Jumanji', 'Aladdin', there are too many to mention ... He died of depression although he achieved something most humans1 could only dream of. He made people around the world laugh, he made them cry, but above all, he made them happy. Doing any of those things to one person would already put a smile on many people's faces. I read in an article that his death succeeded in raising awareness about depression. About how this sickness can bring the biggest men to their knees and above all, how it doesn't judge anyone by its achievements.

The idea

I didn't plan on creating anything, it's not something I would do. But I was looking for a new project idea to try out some technologies and stumbled across a 9gag post about one of his iconic quotes.

So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys—to woo women—and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do.

The 9gag post was a list of words that replaces certain 'very' combinations with a better word2. The insistent lightbulb hovering above my head was telling me something. I had an idea, and it would perfectly align with the technologies I wanted to try. 'The poet's idea was born. It would be something simple and clean. And for one of the first times in my projects, it stayed that way. You can see the result here if you don't believe me. The use cases:

I am a blog writer and I like to write fast, incoherent stuff. I have very strong opinions about everything. As a blog writer, I should avoid using the word 'very' like I did in the previous sentence. I go to 'The poet' and ask whether a better word exists. There is? 'The poet' tells me I shouldn't have very strong opinions, but unyielding opinions. BOOM, best use case ever!

I'm a wiseass and asked 'The poet' whether a better word exists for 'very deadly' while I already know there is a better word. 'The poet' isn't perfect and doesn't know. I can use the suggestion page to suggest a new 'veryWord - betterWord' pair. I'm very happy jubilant now.

Although it's a tiny application, I will explain it in great detail, sorry for that..

Design

As you can see, the uses are endless! Anyhow, back to the application itself. I made a simple layout for the three pages:

Architecture

I wrote the about page and then started on the architecture. The backend uses Azure table storage. NancyFX for routing and API. SquishIt for bundling and minification. HTML5, CSS and AngularJS for the frontend.