Thursday, October 14, 2010

There she blows! An alternative to Lorem ipsum


If you thought my recent blog post about Lorem ipsum was geeky, check this out: Jason B. Jones, a writer of the ProfHacker blog on the website of The Chronicle of Higher Education, has come across a meaningful -- literally -- alternative to Lorem ipsum. It's called Fillerati and was created by a website designer named Michael, who says, "I made Fillerati because I grew tired of reading 'Lorem ipsum...' on every new design I was working on."

In 48 hours, he claims, this guy designed and built an interactive website that generates filler text from actual works of literature. Instead of the nonsensical Latin of Lorem ipsum, you can fill the white space of your Web pages-in-progress with random excerpts from novels by Herman Melville, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells, or L. Frank Baum.

Of course, the works of each of those authors are worth reading in a non-random fashion. You can do so by starting with a search on an author's name in the Hussey-Mayfield online catalog. Just go to the library's home page, click on the little down arrowhead next to "Keyword" at the top of the page, and select "Author." In the "catalog search" box, type the name of an author. Then click the Search button.

Like Melville's Captain Ahab, you could end up looking at the awesome Moby Dick.

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