This app is very out of date and is no longer online. It used an old version of Rails and a limited data set. A newer, completely rewritten version of the app with better data sources is now running on Node/Backbone.js at http://ranndy.com but it not yet open-source.
I am leaving this repository online because the cleaned up census.gov CSV files I used may still be useful to someone, somewhere.
This rails app is intended to function as a random name generator. It pulls in a combination of 1990 and 2000 US Census data using publicly available files and then generate names to the user's specifications.
Options include filtering names by:
- Male vs. Female
- Common vs. Rare
- Frequency within different racial/cultural groups (White, Black, Asian Pacific Islander, Native American, Hispanic)
A hosted version of the site is available on Heroku, using JustOneDB for the database.
Because the source data was inconsistently formatted, I converted the original census data files into clean csv files. The new files can be found in the public folder.
These files can be imported using rake tasks (see csv_import.rake). Due to the large size of the Surname csv file (155,000 rows), the import takes a very long time.