Of the useless things I’ve created at ITP, this one’s probably my favorite. It’s a chatroom where your chats are converted with a Snoop Dogg translator.

The assignment was to get a basic node.js server up and running with a websocket using socket.io. Our sample code was a chatroom. From there, we had to build it out into something more “interesting.”

I had used gizoogle in the past, and thought it would make a funny live chat. I first tried to figure out how to pull the dictionary into my code from their site, but I couldn’t figure it out.

After a bit of googling, I couldn’t have been more excited to find the Node.js gizoogle interface on npm by jannanista. It’s so awesome.

I styled the page a bit, then changed the site to log the full conversation. I’m currently logging a user’s message on their screen before the message goes out, so they only see what they typed, not the translation, but they see everyone else’s text translated. It’s a bit confusing at first, but I think it’s pretty funny this way.

Try it out here: http://lmj332.itp.io:8080/

The code is on GitHub here: https://github.com/lisajamhoury/gizoogle-chat