How Flipmytweet works

I'm like the cynic at a magic show when I see the little web tricks people get excited about. I generally look and say, 'dear lord, we did that eons ago an you're getting excited now?'

But, I saw this tweet today with upside down text and could not figure out how it was done.

 http://www.flipmytweet.com/ ʞuıl sıɥʇ ʍolloɟ sıɥʇ op oʇ ʍoɥ

It's not that I don't know of tricks to fiddle with text using JavaScript or other tools, but this is in the 140 character, plain text world of Twitter, not exactly a place you're going to embed stylesheets or code.

Turns out to be an interesting trick, and really esoteric. They wrote a script that first reverses your text (abc becomes cba) and the substitutes each character with something that LOOKS like the upside down version of the letter.

So, the 'h' for example, is substituted with the latin mu (wait, that's not mu.. damn, can't remember my Greek alphabet…). Some are easier, like d becomes p and visa versa.

Of course, in this era of search engine optimization and text messaging, I wouldn't want to rely on a mix of Unicode and ascii text, but then again, I doubt whoever figured this out was really interested in conforming to standards.