New Features for the Fake Name Generator!

Hurray! New features!

I’ve been working hard to bring some new features to the Fake Name Generator, and here they are:

• A handy terms of service that you are required to accept before viewing a generated name! Hurray! Actually I was forced to add this by my web host. Oh well.
• Canadian addresses. This much requested feature has finally been added. We now can generate addresses for 10 Canadian provinces/territories. More countries on the way!
• Australian addresses. Yup. Another country. Street names need some work (not very Australian sounding) but the city/state/zip/phone numbers are pretty on target.
• Styles. There are now two choices for the generated name: normal and uncommon. Normal will use the weighted list of names to show very plausible names. Uncommon will select from the least common names to generate something a little more unusual. For example, Oswaldo Loughnan.
• More email addresses. I have added another 4 email providers. Your random name will randomly use one of them. I figure the variety will make the data more useful.
• Bulk order options. You can now select which countries and genders you want to receive in your bulk identity orders.
• Age calculator. Hold your mouse over the birthdate for a few seconds and a tooltip should popup telling you how old a person would be who was born on that date.

That’s about it I think. I’d like to make addresses available for the top 10 visiting countries, which include:

• Slovenia (not exactly sure where or what this is.. Other than the United States, they are the most frequent visitors..)
• United Kingdom
• Sweden
• Spain
• Germany
• France
• Italy

If you don’t see your country listed, tell your friends in your country about the Fake Name Generator! If you can generate enough traffic, then I’ll add your country.

Update 6/28/2006: Added some neat code. If you haven’t selected a country, the page will determine what country you are visiting from, and if it is Australia, it will display an Australian address, and if from Canada, a Canadian address, or United States if any other country.

In addition, fixed a bug that was causing some random identities to be repeated. We are re-generating bulk order files to send as replacements for defective files.

Update 6/29/2006: Improved upon the randomization code even more, so hopefully things will be getting very random.

Also added the ability to purchase bulk order files with Social Security Numbers or Australian Social Insurance Numbers. An SSN/SIN would be useless outside of testing, and you need many if you are going to be testing something, so the only way to get them is to order them.

Another fun feature: The birthday on the Australian generator page is displayed in Australian fashion (i.e., 29 June 2006). Canadian dates are still shown in “Month Day, Year” format because I have no way of knowing if the visitor speaks French or not, and I think the English Canadians do dates like us Americans.

In addition, you can now generate French names. Figured this would be useful for all those French-Canadians. Our French name selection is currently very limited (only about 20,000 unique combinations), so please contact us if you have access to a list of French given names or surnames.

And now to make the Canadian generator even better, the streets are localized. That means that the street that is displayed is actually one that could very likely exist in that city. Many of the street names are even French! Hope this helps our Canadian visitors some…