Plurality

A while back, I bought a domain name for a video game series idea for AnacondaSoftware, The Only Thing To Fear.com. However, unlike the other domains I buy, I wasn't originally able to put a placeholder page on it like the other domains I own but don't currently use, due to a script error in my host's domain adding script. For a long time the domain didn't go anywhere, then finally I got it straightened out so it linked to a empty directory.

For a little while I just used it as an intermediary for transferring some files aroung (trying to transfer a Java program to my phone over the internet, transferring files from my home machine to my notebook last weekend while I was at the hospital, and a couple other things). However it didn't really have any other purpose at that point. I originally wanted to duplicate the entries I was making on the main AnacondaSoftware site related to the phobias there, but that was set aside because I hadn't really touched them since I decided to give up Coranto.

So last week, a line of discussion on Notebook Forums, a line of conversation led me to quoting 1984. As a sneaky tactic, I put up a small page on the domain saying a particular user was in room 101. He found, to his dismay, that it was my site, he thought maybe it was a site with some form that could be filled out to make anyone's name appear. I liked that idea, and decided to implement it.

So today I wrote up a short PHP application, with a submission form, expanded to also include a fear. Adding the fear, though, left a couple of grammatical ambiguities, so I decided to make it a little intelligent. The form, for example, automatically capitalizes the fear for the third line, and rudimentarily determines if the fear is plural by checking the last letter for an 's', and changes the verb after it to "is" or "are" accordingly. I'll also add a variable for whether a fear is a proper noun, to overwrite the capitalization to leave as written (since sometimes a proper name occasionally has a lowercase letter as its first letter or has the last letter an 's', such as the name of the company eMachines), and set the verb properly for that case.

I may add some more features to it, to tie it in with my original idea for the placeholder page, but those will be done at another time. For now, have fun causing fear!