Captain Beefheart Song Titles

Here is a silly project that I knocked out last week - a generator of Fake Captain Beefheart Song Titles

It was inspired by a comment on Gideon Coe's radio show on BBC 6 Music where he wondered if such a thing existed - it didn't - so I wrote one!

The 'algorithm', if you can call it that, combines words from real Beefheart song titles and a list of others that sound (to me) like they could be. The structure of the real titles is relatively simple with most of them following a few simple patterns. Some of the generated titles don't work but every so often it'll spit out a good one.

The site is built with Ruby and Sinatra, with some jQuery thrown in for the scrolling effect. It serves as a nice example if you are learning Sinatra. You can find the code at Github and the application is hosted on Heroku.

It's just a bit of fun, but writing a small, self-contained application like this is a great way to learn new technologies. Giving yourself a short time frame in which to develop and deploy a complete application is a great exercise in efficiency.