who are you to deny it?

Please distribute this art product freely, and use at your own risk.

spam.txt (should be renamed spam.cgi)

version 0.69.pi - december 17th, 2000

• seperated code into named packages and started using strict pragma for better readability.
• added better comments to hopefully make each package and subroutine easier to understand.
• various minor bug fixes.

version 0.69.pi - august 23rd, 2000

• rewrote the alphabetizing subroutine making it many times more efficient, noticeably speeding up the time it takes to generate a poem.
• made the menu more interactive, allowing the user to specify not only background color, but also font face, size and color. All default to random.
• introduced capability to handle multiple datawaste files. currently hard coded at three seperate files, but in the future will make the number of data files a more configurable value.

version 0.69 - april 16th, 2000

• now you can easily email text versions of the spam poems to anyone with an email address. What good is a spam machine if you can't spam people with it? heh.
• interactive background colors, so a user can choose from white, black or random according to personal preference.
• added some new features in the datawaste statistics, including the nth most common occurrence of an entry. More info than anyone could ever want to know about the datawaste file.

version 0.69.beta - february 19th, 2000

• this version of the S.P.A.M. machine is loosely based on earlier versions, but much of the original code has been rewritten and / or reorganized. The multi-script modular design has been abandoned in favor of a single inclusive one, meaning all the functionality has been streamlined into one slick script. It is no longer necessary to have three seperate CGI files plus an HTML form, because it's all taken care of in a single interactive script. While the average user won't even notice the difference, it makes a bit more sense from a programming standpoint, and is more efficient, compact, and easier to install and maintain.
• added amazing alliteration functionality, so that occasionally random lines will only choose words starting with the same letter instead of from the entire data file.
• rewrote the font color selection so that it truly generates a (web safe) random hex color combination instead of selecting from a limited set of predetermined colors. Also applied this hex color generation to the background color of the page, so everything is a great deal more colorful now.

version 0.42 - friday, january 21st, 2000

• added a third script that gathers datawaste statistics; users can easily keep track of the total number of entries in the data file, as well as the number of entries broken down alphabetically by first letter.
• added random capitalization and lowercasing of words.
• added random bold, italic, and underline tags, as well as parentheses and brackets.

version 0.23 - thursday, january 13th, 2000

• two seperate scripts, one adds the words to the data file while a second generates the poems. The data file is a text file that delineates entries with a vertical bar ( | ).
• there is also an HTML page used as the word entry form. users can enter words into the data file to be stored and used in the poems.
• poem generation utilizes random selection for each word, number of words per line, number of lines, font and font color (from a short list of predetermined colors,) font size, and alignment.

Thank you for your interest in our useless.art.scripts! Please direct all questions, comments, criticisms, suggestions, or code ideas to corey@toegristle.com. If you create your own version of the machine please let me know and I will start a list of links.

An ongoing implementation of a spam.poem.anti-art.machine can be found at http://www.toegristle.com/netart/spam/.

Please distribute this art product freely, and use at your own risk.