As I waltz my way around the chaotic orbits of HappySkunk, WebSmith, and Maranginator, I’m getting an ever-clearer picture of how each of the systems will work with the others. One of the keys will be to design an attractive promo card for each day’s challenge; something that carries the necessary details, encourages people to share them, and gets full value from that sharing, if it happens.
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My first thought was that I would use an algorithm to generate a random 2- or 3-word bag name, then use that phrase to generate an appealing thumbnail image, but I’ve flipped that idea on its head. I’m already generating lots of fun images in Unforgettable, so why not start with those and write fun bag names to go with them? That’s a lot less additional work and a much faster way to fill the buffer with useable challenges.
Here’s a preliminary sketch of the first promo card. Notice that it contains the bag name (skunk dishwasher), the first rack of tiles that you’ll see, and a fun image to illustrate the theme. It still needs a bit of polish, but before I can do that, I have to figure out what other elements need to be included.
At the very least, I need to add:
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the maranga logo
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an action URL, to take people to a download page if they aren’t already Maranganistas
And it would be nice to have:
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a way for Maranga to read the bag name directly from the image (EXIF?)
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a way to pull each daily card into Maranga automatically
I’ve already built a MementoDB database with thumbnails and bag names, which I’m populating rapidly. Current total: 204 games in the chamber. My new first_rack tool tells me the opening rack tiles for any given bag name and I’ve also written card_gen to create those daily game card images automatically.
Once I’ve hooked all that up with my old bagname_verify tool (to be sure each bag name actually generates a solveable game) the challenge generation side of Maranginator will be ready to go. It also gives me an actual live feed I can use to test the HappySkunk system that will feed these daily updates to the site.
It might sound like a lot of bother, but I know from experience that if there are a lot of manual steps to make it happen, Maranginator won’t last 2 weeks. But if I can automate the repetitive part and distill the fun bits down into something I can do in a half hour once a month, I can keep this going for years.
