Newswordy: Now with 110% more color.

If you follow Newswordy on Twitter, you might’ve noticed something different today (and if you’re not following Newswordy on Twitter, you should).

Newswordy is a collection of news media buzzwords, built by Oak and curated by Josh Smith. Each day, a new word is posted along with a definition, a quote of its use (or misuse) in the media, and a news and Twitter feed on the subject. If that’s not already enough to win you over, the site algorithmically generates a unique background color for each word, based on the characters in the word itself.

Expatriate is blue, Hacktivist is orange, Grifter is yellow, and so on. Each day, a colorful surprise awaits.

We love the variety colors so much, it felt a bit dull when we had to settle on yellow for the site’s favicon. Well, not anymore. With a little help from GD, we made it possible for the favicon to automatically assume the word of the day’s color. Call it a chameleon favicon (chamelecon?) if you will.

Here we are in a cool shade of expatriate, favicon to match:

Expatriate: word of the day with matching favicon

A Newswordy rainbow in Chrome tabs

The colorful icons also carry over to your favorite Apple touch device. Add Newswordy.com to your home screen and the color will update everyday when you launch the app:

Colorful Newswordy icons on an iPhone (multiple iOS icons shown for illustrative purposes)

And finally, for the trifecta, we also automatically push the color of the day to the @Newswordy Twitter profile (today’s color is lovely shade of certitude).

@Newswordy on Twitter in a lovely shade of certitude

@Newswordy on Twitter in a cool shade of expatriate

This is made possible thanks to the Twitter API, which we are using to update the profile image, background color, and sidebar colors. Lucky for us, it seems Twitter is much happier when changing profile images through the API vs. the website (which seems to be broken at least 50% of the time).

Since the profile image now correlates with the word of the day, it’s easy spot and recognize in your Twitter feed:

A Newswordy tweet, with corresponding colors

This is our way of injecting a little bit of color into your day. We hope you enjoy it with certitude.

In an upcoming post, we’ll talk more about the algorithmic process we use to convert words into colors. Subscribe to our RSS feed for updates.