Firstly, let me just say that I know how ridiculous the pun is, but it was the only domain that wasn’t already taken. The other alternative was acronymphomaniac.com, and that didn’t seem to have the right connotation.

Writing HTML is fairly boring, and writing out all of the acronyms that you might use is a little like castrating yourself: you really, really don’t want to do it, but you know you have to. I guess the analogy only applies to aspiring eunuchs, but the point remains the same. The faithful and well-behaved web developer always seeks to make everything look pretty and standards-compliant (right?) until the customers come in and screw everything up to the point where you’re embarrassed it has your name on it (can we all just agree that target="_blank" is the worst thing ever?). Acronymulator seeks to make the journey to that Hell as painless and quick as possible. Because we all want to get to Hell as quickly as possible. Or something.

Clearly, reasons are not real important here. What is important is that this is a cool little utility that relieves your pain in small and convenient ways. And, of course, I had to do something with this domain name.

So, exactly what is this thing? Well, it’s the answer to your prayers. What I mean is, it’s the answer to not having to write and/or remember acronyms. I guess it’s only the answer to my prayers. My religion is small, but ridiculously fervent.

Acronymulator uses JavaScript to automatically supply the definitions of acronyms from a pre-populated list customized to your own spark of brilliance. One need only look as far as this one-page site to see Acronymulator at work being brilliant and stuff.

Acronymulator also strives for consistency as well brilliance. Not only will it automatically add the title attribute to the acronyms, but it will also unobtrusively style all acronyms with the following CSS:

acronym {
  border-bottom: 1px dotted #000000;
  cursor: help;
}

Say you have an acronym called HTTP in your HTML, which of course is ensconced in <acronym> tags. The dutiful web developer will spend a few seconds to create the title="HyperText Transfer Protocol" attribute, which, of course, is the same as allowing Satan to go on a date with your sister. The intelligent web developer will just slap the <acronym> tags around it and let Acronymulator do the rest.

All you have to do is slop a <script> tag linking to Acronymulator’s JavaScript in your HTML, and Acronymulator formats all of your acronyms for you.

Acronymulator has been exhaustively tested and verified in the following browsers (test).

• IE5+
• Firefox 0.8+
• Opera 7.02+
• Chrome 1+
• Safari 3.1+

Basically, it works on any browser released after 1995.

The Acronymulator JavaScript has been YUI compressed. There are links for gzipped or plain text. There are two options for implementation:

1. Use this site as an external mirror for your JavaScript
   • e.g. src="http://acronymulator.com/32"
   • or gzipped: src="http://acronymulator.com/32/gz"
2. Host the JavaScript locally by downloading it to your server
   • e.g. src="/media/js/acronymulate.js"

Either way is equally legal.

Choose your acronyms:

Want to request an acronym? Did I misspell something? Find a bug? Please send me some mail.