Gaffe = Giraffe
In an election year, news stories about so-called gaffes by candidates at all levels (though most prominently presidential) seem to multiply exponentially and at some point become inescapable. While candidates’ gaffes provide great fodder for bloggers and columnists, the attention given to them can start to seem pretty ridiculous. A while back I decided I’d had enough of stories about gaffes and developed a solution to make political news a bit more readable.
Gaffe = Giraffe is a bookmarklet based around a simple jQuery script that finds all instances of the word “gaffe” on a given page, including compound and hyphenated words, and replaces them with the word “giraffe”. For example, an article headlined “Why candidates’ gaffe-a-thon is good for us” becomes, when the bookmarklet is applied, “Why candidates’ giraffe-a-thon is good for us”. Even better, its first sentence is translated to:
This last week has been chock full of giraffes by our presidential candidates — a veritable giraffe-a-thon, a giraffe-a-palooza.
Gaffe = Giraffe uses the jQuery replaceText library. The source is available here and may be freely modified or reused. If you enjoy Gaffe = Giraffe, please let me know!
Previewing forms with jQuery
Sometimes, HTML forms can be meaningless and not convey a clear story. Imagine a business card-printing website that lets you write some text but doesn’t give you the option to preview what your card woud look like. In terms of interactivity, this would certainly confuse the end-user. Thankfully, with JavaScript and jQuery, better user interfaces can be achieved.
Support local businesses with Supportland
Here at Winning Mark, we love to support local businesses, and Supportland provides an easy and beneficial way to do just that.
Supportland incentivizes shopping locally by creating an integrated rewards system across 117 small businesses in Portland. It’s similar to a traditional purchase-reward system, but in addition to earning a reward for repeated purchases at a given business you also earn points that can be redeemed for a wide variety of rewards across the entire set of businesses.
How does it work? It’s simple. Every time you make a purchase at a networked business, you get a punch towards that business’s reward, and your card is swiped and loaded with points. If it’s a place you’ve been before, you get 5 points, while if it’s a new-to-you outpost you get a whopping 15 points. Once you’ve accumulated enough points, you can redeem them for something cool — for example, 250 points get you a $25 gift certificate at Cloud Cap Games, while 120 get you a free yoga class at Pureheart Yoga. Businesses can also create point-incentivized temporary specials: for instance, buying a handbag at Tilde this month will earn you 100 points.
It’s important to keep our economy healthy by buying locally — Supportland makes it not just easy but fun and rewarding to do so.
