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factorial-tumblr-poster

Program that queues ridiculously large number-centric tumblr posts in bulk

This dumb little project may be my favorite.

Around 2015-2016 I saw a blog on tumblr which simply posted increasing powers of two. Each post contained the number itself, followed by its written name, and possibly any interesting facts about the number. This silly yet excellent idea inspired me to do the same kind of thing for factorial numbers. Obviously, I needed a program to do this for me once the numbers got big enough.

The two big challenges were writing code to generate the names of numbers, and to schedule posts on my blog. The former was overcome with a lot of hard work. I also managed to find a library that took care of the blog part, once I got my tokens etc. In 2018 I added a much more efficient factorial method and cleaned up the naming code a lot.

It was immensely satisfying to press one button and schedule the next ~200 posts instantly. My blog actually received more attention than I expected and I loved seeing people's astounded reactions. The posts eventually became so long that the app on my phone would crash if I viewed one (this is hilarious)! I added a "show more" tag to truncate the posts but that only seemed to work on the desktop site. So I sadly haven't been posting there for awhile. Maybe one day I'll return to it.

Links

Rules for naming large numbers (up to a millinillion) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers#Extensions_of_the_standard_dictionary_numbers
Factorial swing method - http://www.luschny.de/math/factorial/SwingFactorialSagePython.html
The blog that inspired mine - https://powersoftwo.tumblr.com
My factorial blog - https://allthefactorials.tumblr.com