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2021 0121 Biblemunger 2.0

Several years ago now, I started a little joke project called biblemunger. It let you make jokes in the style of some of my favorite articles from The Toast.

Today, I finished a rewrite. Now it has a homepage that randomly loads a good single-verse munge, and has a better UI all around. Oh yeah, and I’m not afraid of CSS any more.

https://biblemunger.micahrl.com

See the munge page to make your own right away, or for a list of suggestions. You can also see some of my favorites on the project page

A huge improvement

Today, it looks like this:

A huge improvement from where I started back in (… checks git log) 2015:

Changes and upgrades

  • Huge visual improvemenet. I barely tolerated CSS back when I started this project, and today I’m much more comfortable with it. (The design and original version of this CSS comes from my wonderful friend – and actual designer – Benjamin Godwin.)
  • imo the dropcaps make it way funnier.
  • You can link to individual verses with a munge. Version 1.0 could only munge the whole Bible at once, but now you can just link to a single verse. When doing a munge from /munge, click on any verse on the results page to see your munge in just that verse.
  • There is a secret control panel where you can play with different fonts, including a digital restoration of the original typeface of the 1611 KJV. (Screenshot.)
  • (You may recognize the designer of that font as the same person who designed the font for Cistercian numerals.)
  • I spent some effort to make sure old URIs from https://toys.micahrl.com/biblemunger/ will continue to work. I don’t think anyone will notice if they break, but if you happen to notice that they have, please email me; I consider it a bug.

Wishlist for the future

  • Automatically generated images for social – it would be really nice if any munge page generated a PNG that Twitter/Facebook displayed containing text of the actual munge in the preview.
  • Some visual cleanup here and there, e.g. loading pages aren’t that nice.
  • Munging a multi-verse passage. I’ve written the code for this, but there is no UI for doing so. If you want to play with it, you can put verse IDs in the URI, e.g. https://biblemunger.micahrl.com/munge/Aaron/Shrek/2-7-1/2-7-25 – that’ll do a munge for all of Exodus chapter 7, and it’ll include verses that do not have the search term. (No promises these URIs will work going forward, although I have no plans to change them at this time.)
  • The ability to do multiple munges at once, for instance, heavens => fast and earth => furious would be pretty funny. This probably requires storing the munges on the server, though, which requires more attention to security and makes the URIs opaque, so I’m not that excited about it.

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