Generator Land’s development team is currently attending a conference in Amsterdam. However before they left on Monday, they failed to tell us the name of the conference and where they were staying. Also we noticed all the petty cash was missing.

If anyone is aware of a developers conference currently going on in Amsterdam, please contact us. Also, if you’re reading this from Amsterdam and you happen to bump into Kevin, Joe, Burhan, Alexei, Wayne, Doug, or Henri, please ask them to call the office.

Thanks!

By MikeR, Generatorland.com

It’s not all fun and drunken boasting here at Generator Land. We also have to work sometimes and like everyone else, we’re often flooded with email.

I’ve become an Inbox Zero Zealot and one of the things I’ve noticed about being in the Inbox Zero frame of mind is that you value email a lot less. Actually, I should say you value certain emails a lot less. When someone sends you a “Thank you” or an innocuous “FYI” you just can’t wait to digitally incinerate it.

I’ve gotten to the point that when Outlook flashes up its little email notification alert, I read the first line of the email and decide if it’s deletable and then take action right in the little alert window. Delete it, flag it, or open it are all available from a dropdown in the email alert preview window. Nice.

After deleting three new emails in the space of a minute yesterday I began to feel like I was using an instant messenger, not email. Messages sent via IM are impermanent and fleeting. Some people save IM conversations for later reference but I doubt it’s as common as people saving emails. Now I’m blowing through emails like instant messages. Nice.

Sure, there’s a risk I’ll delete something without realizing I should have saved it, but I think by now most of us have a pretty firm grasp on who sends us the useless and trivial emails and how they can be quickly identified. Those are the ones I target with extreme prejudice.

So the next time Agnes in HR sends you an email inviting everyone to the breakroom for birthday carrot cake, make sure her email spends less than two seconds in your Inbox. Then go get yourself some cake.

Nobody ever writes anything down around here, but it occurred to someone in Marketing that Generator Land has been around for a year this month.

That took many of us my surprise. Seems like only yesterday we began this fateful journey into the world of random generators and now, one year later, we stand atop the heap of random generator sites that are published within the generatorland.com domain. High-fives everyone. High (sniff) fives.

We also couldn’t help noticing that our birth conincides with American Craft Beer Week. We believe this was not as much a coincidence as it was an impetus.

So thanks to all of our loyal members, users, and passers-by. We’re the proudest and, likely, tallest one-year-olds on the planet.

When you create something you like on Generator Land and you want to save it you have two options.

1. Save it to your member page
2. Save it to the Hall of Fame

Historically, we’ve let anyone post their stuff to the Hall of Fame, which was really cool when we started out. We vividly recall the day the Willy Name Generator struck a chord with an Irish Rugby forum and we received 1,600 submissions within an hour or two. However, we’ve begun getting a lot of spam through the submission form lately and we’re not big fans of imposing captchas on our users every time they want to submit something.

So we’ve decided to make the Hall of Fame a “member’s only” feature in the near future. You’ll just have to take a moment to sign up the first time and then you’ll be free to create and submit to your heart’s content. Everyone will still be able to view the Hall of Fame, but only members will be able to add new stuff to it.

Since being a member is free and requires nothing more than a username and password, we don’t expect the number of submissions to drop much. We love those submissions and personally approve/disapprove each one. And if you know any spammers personally, tell them we hate them.

GL friend, Dan, had the great suggestion for a Nun Name Generator which is now in production. The idea immediately conjured images of “Sister Mary Elephant” of Cheech & Chong fame. We will draw on our vast experience in catholic grade schools to derive words that evoke the part-matriarchal/part-Godzilla nature of the parochial school nun.

We’re also planning to add a dessert item to the Froo Froo Menu Generator. Beef Gelato Puffs anyone? This was suggested by Kit a while back and we’re finally getting around to it. Sorry for the delay, Kit.

Finally, we’re thinking about a Drink Name Generator. A quick look at any bar tending site will reveal the random generator possibilities inherent. If you have ideas for any of these post a comment or go to submit an idea.

We’ve added screenshots of all the generators to their respective ratings/overview pages, something we’d been meaning to do for a while but seemed to keep forgetting. It’s nothing earth-shattering but it looks nice. Here’s an example:

http://www.generatorland.com/display.php?id=77

Also we wanted to call your attention to a fine post by 37Signals dude, Jason Fried, called “Urgency is Poisonous.” We couldn’t agree more.

This has just a little to do with Generator Land, but we want to put it out there. We are adding large thumbnails (if that’s not a paradox) to our generator description pages and our effort is being greatly aided by a Firefox extension developed by Evgeny Suslikov called “Fireshot.” Fireshot sticks a slightly garish button on the toolbar that gives you the option of screencapping the visible page or the entire page (all the way down offscreen). You can then edit the screen capture right there in Firefox including cropping, adding callouts, etc. The feature set of the editor is way more than you’d expect.

If you do Web work you do a lot of screen caps. Download Fireshot and send Evgeny some scratch.

Since the inception of Generator Land, we’ve wanted to build a community of like-minded people who relish the opportunity to waste a crapload of time creating random and ludicrous things. We wanted them to be able to share both their creations and their opinions. While we’ve always given people the opportunity to comment on the generators we’ve featured (both our own and others) and we’ve let everyone contribute to the ever-expanding Hall of Fame, we’ve never let people have their own little plot of land on the site.

Now we do. Or you do, rather. Well I guess technically we both do. Anyway, the point is that by joining Generator Land as a member, you get your own page on the site where you can save all the wonderful and ludicrous things you create using our Generators. You now have your own slice of our pizza. Your own beer in our fridge. Your own..well you get the idea.

To get your own Personal Generator Land page, all you have to do is register. Then go out and play with our generators. If you generate something really funny, just click “Add to My Page.” Now it’s yours forever. Once you’ve added a bunch of Grade A comic material to your page, why not share it with a friend or loved one? If you didn’t select “Share my page with others” when you registered, just click on “Edit Page/Preferences” and check it. You’ll then get a link that you can send to Uncle Ted or Aunt Lou.

You can also add your page to the Generator Land Member Pages, where people you hardly know can marvel over your brilliance. Your ears will burn with the knowledge that someone else is laughing at your handiwork. Or you might have some sort of rash. Either way, what fun!

So now Generator Land has a blog. “Why you ask?” Well, it’s for a variety of reasons. Mostly we had previously been trying to tuck site news and information into this little area at the top of the home page and it really forced us to pare down our blathering. Room to blather, that’s all we wanted. Plus it was a pain to update, since it meant editing code, which we like to leave to our programmers as much as possible. They like editing code–we’re not sure why. But God bless them and their Diet Cokes and pizza and remote control helicopters.

Now we get to use WordPress, which is nice, and it’s much easier for us to talk about what’s going on with the site–and there’s been a lot going on lately, not even counting our server downtime the other night. We’re pretty sure a remote control helicopter crashed into a fairly important server, but we’re not pointing fingers, Ed.

Upcoming posts will feature the changes and new stuff we’ve added to Generator Land and why we added it. We’re big on soft launches apparently. Also we’ll talk about some new generators we’re working on.

We hope you’ll feel free to comment on all this and tell us when we’re being stupid or unoriginal as well as when we do something funny and milk is shooting out of your nose. It’s all good.