About Legal Ipsum
Gibberish is a crowded space to play in. It is already inhabited by such worthy efforts as:
So what are we doing here? What added value do we bring to the table? To be honest, we're not sure. Mostly what's going on is that while trolling for an available domain name for a real project, I happened to notice that legalipsum.com was unregistered. How I could I resist investing $10.99 in such an excellent domain? The rest is history.
Project history
The domain name was registered on a Wednesday afternoon. April 18, 2012, to be exact. A late night hacking session that very evening got the core Markov chain code built and tested. Then, as is so often the case, the initial adrenaline rush wore off and the project lay fallow for days.
Saturday morning rolled around. It was a beautiful spring day. I could have been out there prepping my boat for the upcoming sailing season. Or cleaning out the garage. Or working in the garden. I chose hacking and got to work.
Set up a repo on Bitbucket. Banged out a quick django app. Downloaded a bunch of open source licenses to use as a text corpus. Snarfed a nice looking image from Wikipedia. Some simple templates. A little CSS. Tweaked the Markov code so the result wasn't quite so random.
OK, it works, now what?
My boss mentioned the other day that if you're not a little embarrassed about the product, you waited too long to launch. Hmm, that seems to be rule #6 from here. Well, there's no doubt that releasing this would be an embarrassment, so I guess that means it's ready to go. Who knows, this could be the next Instragram.
Who did this?
Legal Ipsum is a production of City Island Software