Wordcamp Seattle 2012 Typer

Yesterday was Wordcamp Seattle 2012 and much learning and nerdy merriment was had by all. The keynote speaker Scott Berkun spoke about a number of things, one of which is that the difference between one blog and the next is the amount of work spent on the writing. He showed a time lapse video of one of his writing sessions, during which i tweeted a thought

listening to @berkun's keynote at #wcsea. really like the 
timelapse video of writing. wondering how i might do 
one for code

Later during Wordcamp Seattle, I wrote a PHP script for you to simulate the look of the typing, but without the editing aspect. Just open the Terminal, and run the typer.php script from the command line. There are two arguments the script can take – a filename (which is required), and a speed (which is optional). For your convenience, I’ve provided a test file, containing the Gettysburg address. To read the Gettysburg address run the following command

$ ./typer.php gettysburg.txt

If you wanna be meta, you could feed it to itself. As I mentioned, you can set the speed which it should display the file. Here’s how to watch it at medium speed.

$ ./typer.php typer.php medium

Download the tarball and try it out on your system.