We’ve got a new tag at SitePoint: Oddball. Its intention - to aggregate all the really weird and unnatural usages of our favorite programming languages.
Every post that’s a little outside the standard use of a language, like Detecting keypresses with PHP for a PHP-Snake game, will get tagged Oddball because such a use of the language is highly unconventional - it was never designed to do such things.
To find the oddball posts of your preferred language, just concatenate the tags like so:
https://www.sitepoint.com/tag/php+oddball
or
https://www.sitepoint.com/tag/java+oddball
Don’t worry if there’s nothing there yet for your preferred language - we’re working on populating the tag as quickly as possible with posts from the past - but do use this opportunity to think of some new and weird projects you could write about, or have our authors write about. We’re looking for adventurous authors who don’t mind getting their hands dirty by taking a language apart and just forcing it to do something. Here are some examples from PHP land:
- Automating your home with PHP
- Playing music with PHP (either connect an instrument to it, or use it to produce sounds on a speaker, QBasic style)
- Interactive NLP painter with PHP (“talk” to an engine and have it draw what you’re saying - like, “a flower swaying in the wind” or “a circle within a square within a red pentagon”)
- Game physics calculations with PHP - build an old scorched earth game clone
- Rebuild old DOS games in PHP
Feel like you could write any of these? We’d pay very, very well.
Did you build something weird with PHP? Let us know.