TextExpander lipsum followup, with ice cream

It turns out it was me that was broken, not the Loremipscream API. That API can return just plain text, so the shell scripts are much more readable than trying to hack apart XML in Bash. You can get a list of “flavors” from the website, or just curl "http://loremipscream.com/flavors.xml" from the command line. That will also give you the slugs you need to use when calling them.

_why’s Chunky Bacon¹ is nice, and Sailing Three Tuesdays² (whose slug is “emo,” appropriately) is hilarious. There’s even one (Soylent Cream) which spits out fake identities³, and there are German and Czech flavors, too. Try them out on the website and then just paste a line like this in a TextExpander snippet set to “Shell Command”:

#!/bin/bash
curl "http://loremipscream.com/flavors/chunky_bacon/serving.txt"

That will spit out a nice, small chunk of random text in your preferred flavor. Of course, you could always make a few different snippets to suit any mood. For reference, here’s the API info, and here are the available flavors and their slugs:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<flavors>
  <flavor>
    <name>Vanilla</name>
    <slug>vanilla</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>Mint Chocolate Czech</name>
    <slug>mint</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>Sailing Three Tuesdays</name>
    <slug>emo</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>Soylent Cream</name>
    <slug>soylent</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>Texas Toast</name>
    <slug>toast</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>German Chocolate</name>
    <slug>chocolate</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>Chunky Bacon</name>
    <slug>chunky_bacon</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>Neapolitician</name>
    <slug>neapolitician</slug>
  </flavor>
</flavors>

I should also take the opportunity to mention another cool take on the “greeking” text idea: Kwisatz Haderach, which my friend (and TUAW blogger) Kelly Guimont has been contributing to. Have a look, it’s fun stuff. You can always make non-random TextExpander snippets out of whatever is going to be the most useful to you. Assuming Lorem Ipsum is useful to you, which is probably a poor assumption to make. I think we’ll both survive this, though.

If you haven’t seen my last TextExpander bonanza, check it out to see what else it can do. That one includes some good static Lipsum snippets and HTML Lipsum, amongst some neat tricks. I’ve posted a few other TextExpander experiments, some more useful than others. Have a look, see if anything helps you out!