Nothing ventured, nothing gained

“What is a haiku?”

From wikipedia:

“Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 syllables, in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively.”

Personally, I prefer the way Stephany, an early haikuist describes the way of the haiku:

To write a Haiku
Five then Seven, Five again
Simple, yet complex

And with that, I’d like to introduce you to a fun project that I’ve been working on for a few months. It’s called the Haikuist and it’s aimed at people that love composing haiku poetry.

“What is haikuist.com?”

Haikuist.com
Poetic micro-blogging
for haiku lovers.

Haikuist first began as a place to keep track of my random acts of haiku writings. Also, it stemmed from my deep frustration of the growing number of badly formed haiku being published on the internet. Counting syllables should be easier, so I did what every problem solving software engineer would do: write code!

Syllable detection isn’t technically the most trivial thing to solve, but what started as a 200 line Ruby¹ program eventually grew into what you see today at haikuist.com.

I’m extremely excited about Haikuist. It’s fast, simple to use, and offers fascinating insight into the minds of creative people. I am surprised at how poetic people can be.

Haikuist is a work in progress and will continue to improve over time. Sign up at today and invite your friends along for the ride, you may be surprised by what they say.