allbingo | More updates to the Bingo Card Generator

Hallo, all! I'm the one who's been coding the Bingo Card Generator over at http://an.owomoyela.net/fun/bingo_generator , and I thought I'd drop in and let you know of some new features.

A longstanding bug with the Aarne-Thompson Fairytale Classifications list has been resolved, meaning that now you can use that list in conjunction with other lists, and it will select values from the whole Aarne-Thompson list and not just the first 852 or so.
Background color, text color, and border color are now all customizable, with a popup color picker. You should be able to specify any color you'd like for any of these values, and if all the JavaScript is working correctly, you'll be able to see how it looks in an example square before selecting it.
You can now generate 3x3 and 7x7 cards.

I'm hoping to add in an option to toggle the free space on and off soon, as well as adding 2x2, 4x4, and 6x6 generators. (The even square generators, for reasons having to do with code architecture, need the free space toggle to be implemented before they can be added in.)

Anyway, let me know if you see anything going wildly wrong! And if there are features you'd really like to see, let me know. I can't promise to implement them all, but I know that people may begin using this in ways I didn't anticipate, and it's be cool to support those uses as much as is practical. :)

–magi

[Update] Just added in some center-space customization!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Playing around with the prompt lists made me wonder something. How do lists of different lengths interact with each other? Some lists are very long, while others are shorter. My suspicion is that long lists may wind up putting more prompts into a card where several lists are merged.

Might there be a way to toggle between "merge all lists and select randomly" (which will weight toward longer lists) or "take similar amounts from each list" (which will balance lists)? It would probably have to be restricted by numbers; frex, you could do 2 lists with 12 prompts from each, or 4 lists with 6, etc.

Now, that's an interesting idea. Yeah; currently, every individual option in the list is weighted equally, which means that sub-lists with more individual options end up with greater weight. (This is why anything generated with the Aarne-Thompson list will probably end up mostly Aarne-Thompson; with over 2000 items in it, it's hard for anything else to compete.) It seems like there should be a way to select randomized sub-lists from the selected lists as they're loaded in – it'd just take some heavy listing on the JavaScript side of things, as by the time the processing hits the server side (which is where I'm accustomed to doing the heavy lifting), there's no attached information to indicate which specific prompts came from what source.

So, the implementation would probably be to have a "Include a maximum of x prompts from each selected list" box, and when it was selected, it would go through a process where:

* It looked at all of the selected lists
* It retrieved the data for each list, broke it up into an array of values, and selected a randomized set of up to x options
* It loaded those into the editor view.

Which seems possible, if potentially processing-heavy. And it would probably not be terribly kind to people who wanted to edit the items included on each list before limiting them; that is, selecting a maximum of x prompts would have to select them from the entire list, not any subset of the list, unless I wanted to hugely redo the code architecture.

Still, it's an idea I can play around with.

>> And it would probably not be terribly kind to people who wanted to edit the items included on each list before limiting them; that is, selecting a maximum of x prompts would have to select them from the entire list, not any subset of the list, unless I wanted to hugely redo the code architecture. <<

I think the most efficient way would be to edit the list *after* trimming it. Say you pick 4 lists. The program cuts them all down to 10 prompts. You edit out 4 you don't want. Then you push the button and get a card.

Having a toggle on/off for the weighting feature would give people a choice. So if the editing is harder to do, or impossible, with the Equalize Weight option on, people still have the unequal option if they want to edit the lists a lot.

>> Still, it's an idea I can play around with. <<

Yay! I can usually frame my ideas in computer concepts. I am less good at guessing what is doable at this level of technology, let alone what is easy.

More updates to the Bingo Card Generator

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