The Rock Band Name Generator v3.0
About 9 years ago at my first agency job there was an extended period of time where there was very little to do in the way of projects (one of the first signs that the agency would close its doors almost a year later). One day the creative department, bored out of our skulls, holed ourselves up in the conference room for the afternoon and for some reason now lost to me began filling the enormous white board in there with ridiculous band names.
I dutifully wrote all those names down for no other reason that I had nothing better to do and thought they might be worth keeping. A year later I ran across that list in a sketchbook and thought it was time to do something with it. I separated the names into a couple of different database tables, did a little ASP programming, and the first version of the Rock Band Name Generator was born. The first version didn’t work very well… the algorithm I designed to determine the band name was terribly flawed and didn’t do a good job of tapping the wide variety of words that were in the database.
About 5 years ago I found the code for v1.0 and retooled it to run in PHP. I decided to put a Flash front end on it because, “hey, let’s throw Flash at everything” was my mantra at the time. The second version also didn’t work very well, mostly because the implementation of my Flash front end was really wonky.
My Rock Band Name is:
Gregarious Whores
Fast forward to last night. I thought to celebrate the release of Rock Band 2 I would dust off those RBNG database tables that hadn’t been accessed in 4 years or so and give them new life. I rewrote the logic from scratch (and got it right this time!), added a randomize feature, threw in a little AJAX and topped it off with some social media tools such as a send to a friend feature and the ability to embed your rock band name into your blog, Myspace profile, etc. via the RBNG widget (shown left).
Yeah, its another dumb web toy like the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator (I’m Beretta Hockey Palin BTW), but it’s been a pet project of mine for years and I figured it would be fun to finally release it in the manner that I always wanted to. You can visit it at myrockbandname.com. There are still a few features I’d like to add but it’s 95% complete as it stands.