Thinking of the numbers

I was lucky enough to be invited to the inaugural Guardian Hack Day on Thursday/Friday of last week. What a great time I had, and what a terrific bunch of people they have working there. For those of you dear readers who’ve not been to a Hack Day, just imagine a room full of geeks trying to do something cool in 24 hours, with no sleep. Oh, and lots of pizza and beer.

I was pretty sure that I wanted to do something with numbers, specifically with the big monetary numbers that have been littering every article since the economy tanked: £300bn for Bank of Scotland here, £140bn for Northern Rock there, £1bn bail-out for the Post Office, £6million a year for Jonathan Ross. It’s all too much.

So, I wrote a script that lets you see what this money could buy if we weren’t throwing it at second-rate comedians or third-rate bankers. What if we spent it on schools, or teachers, or wispas instead? My script lets you see that by altering the text of Guardian articles as you browse.

Look! A picture where you can see the fruits of my labours in a fetching burgundy colour:

To use the script, you’ll need to be using Firefox and have the GreaseMonkey add-on installed. Once you have them, click here to install the script and then visit any article on the Guardian site and click an alternative unit from the ‘Swap numbers’ floating menu.

Update: I’ve repackaged the script as a Chrome extension that you can install from here. Source code is on github.

Yes, it’s a bit silly and I’ve left a lot unpolished, but that’s not the point of a 24-hour hacking competition.

What surprised me is how useful alternative monetary amounts may be as a navigation pivot. We’re used to jumping around sites using tags or other text-based navigation, from finance, say, to education stories. I’ve not seen it done with numbers. And, well, someone should. Now. In fact, I just might.

Anyway, I came second in the X-factor vote, and the Guardian said my hack was ‘quite brilliant’ which completely made up for rest of the shitty week I had last week.

Please, Guardian folk, invite me to the next one!

Tags: ghack1, greasemonkey, guardian, hacking