I’ve been chipping away at this one for a little while, with a renewed push I finished it off over the last couple of days.

Basically it’s an N tier random name generator and ranking system with a 3D UI, I’m betting most of you just went WTF!

Here goes (this is all in the context of finding a name for my new feedmill administration application):

1. Client reads in a list of name parts (letters a through to z plus any interesting letter combinations you might like to see in the name, in this case, “feed”, “admin”).
2. Client generates a name from a random sequence of name parts (must be between 3 and 10 letters long).
3. User either accepts (left arrow) or rejects (down arrow) the random name (most of them are illegible so you down arrow a lot).
4. Any accepted names are saved to the DB and ranked with a plus vote against them, the list on the left hand side are all ranked names with a rank > 0.
5. Next time any other client refreshes (goes to generate a name) they have to rank the saved name before they can continue with the random names.
6. The user can back space and re-key any part of a generated name, this is very handy as the random names are usually better at giving you ideas for names than the actual names themselves.
7. A client can also re-vote on all items at any time by pressing F12. All existing votes remain so this is a way of weeding out the really crap ones as well as re-shuffling the list over time.

I’m going to try in out with the work peeps tomorrow, should be interesting to see what we come up with across 3 or 4 clients.

I also planning on using it to try and come up with an original name for our new born, only got a few weeks to go.