Pirate-Ify

A chrome extension that converts text on a webpage to pirate-speak

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Inspiration

The inspiration behind this really came from International Talk Like a Pirate Day. We wanted to figure out a way to make all webpages talk like a pirate. We knew similar things existed at a small scale, like Cloud To Butt but we wanted to make something specific about pirates and piratespeak.

What it does

It replaces certain key words and phrases on webpages by their pirate-speak equivalent. Some examples include things like "members" being interpreted as buccaneers, or "students" as scally-wags. These rules are hard-coded out of simplicity, so it does not scale well with new words. That said, some of the rules for contractions and other hacker related words translate quite nicely to pirate-speak.

How I built it

We built it using javascript and some html + css. It's a very simple function that works by reading in each child element and replacing the child's text with any of the rules that are found in the text.

Challenges I ran into

We had little experience working with chrome extensions, so it was a nice way to learn more about them and develop a fairly simple toy to play around with. Chrome extensions can be quite powerful, if you understand how to use them properly and we got our first chance to dip our toes into extension development.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of having it function as basically as I'd like. I do wish we had more features and the design of the popup looked nicer, but due to the time constraints we had, I think it does a good enough job.

What I learned

I learned some rudimentary javascript (a language neither of us have ever used before) and learned more about chrome extension development.

What's next for Pirate-Ify

I'm curious to figure out if we can apply some nlp techniques to this project. It might shooting a cockroach with a bazooka but I think it might be interesting. We might take some time to improve the design of the extension.

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