Weird Web October - Untold Stories

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A collection of 31 different screenshots arranged in a grid. Each one showing a different web page.

By the time I finished Weird Web October I’d had enough. I needed to close the laptop and do something else. I most definitely was not going to write a blog post about the experience. But Georgie’s post dropped today and that gave me an opening. For all the weird site created through October, I want to know more about the ideas that never saw the light of day.

“I used to intensely gatekeep all my ideas when it came to digital creations and the things I wanted to make, for fear it would get stolen or copied.”

Georgie is not alone in keeping ideas to herself. I was a young boy when I was first encountered an NDA. Stood in an office with someone who wanted to show my father a set of speakers they’d been working on. We couldn’t just see the speakers. First there was a discussion around an NDA (which I didn’t sign). I can remember being baffled as to why someone would keep an idea secret. People are legitimately fearful that someone will take their ideas and run with them, passing them off as their own. It isn’t just novel speaker designs either, Georgie’s post highlights the wilful plagiarism that exists with things as individual and personal as a blog post.

Fear of plagiarism isn’t the only reason ideas are never explored. Far more likely, they are discarded as a step in our creative process. The process of settling in on one idea means we have to reject others along the way. We label them; ‘bad’, ‘difficult’, ‘seen before’, ’too obvious’. These are the ideas I’d like to hear more about. What ideas did you discard? Could they be the spark of inspiration that encourages someone else to have a go at implementing them? How would you feel about that if they did?

Taking Part

If you haven’t come across Weird Web October, the premise is simple.

Weird Web October is a challenge to try and make a website every day of October, based on the theme for each day, inspired by Inktober. It’s open to you and everyone! – Weird Web October

That’s it, those are the rules.

There is one word I missed when I first read this, “challenge”. The premise is simple, a website a day. But the infinite opportunity you have to be creative with the theme requires you to set your own boundaries or constraints. I haven’t written HTML or CSS from scratch in over 10 years and I found it difficult to gauge what I could implement and how long things would take. My self imposed constraints evolved over the course of the month but I was rigid in not allowing myself to work on an idea for more than a day.

I created a README file for each day with the one word theme as the title. For days when an idea jumped out at me I jumped in and started coding. On other days, I had no ideas at all. I’d code (or copy) the outline of the page from the previous day, open up the README and then walk away. During the day, I used to README to jot down ideas. This included things I knew I wouldn’t (or couldn’t) implement. Eventually I’d settle on something I felt I could implement.

Copy pasting between days was a treat that I enjoyed a little too much. If I step back and look at the sites side by side then this shows.

Things I’d Change

  1. More than anything else, I’d vary the colour and layout of pages more. I don’t regret keeping the same basic page structure and colour scheme throughout because I needed a starting point. I didn’t want to spend each day re-reading docs on basic HTML layout. But, looking back over the 31 days, I realise I could have done more with colour.

  2. No back-end components. Some of my favourite sites relied on backend components but I think I’d introduce this constraint next time round. I found that I was doubling the workload and introducing a context switch that meant I spent more time on these entries than I really should have. Perhaps back-end / front-end collaboration is an option to explore in future.

  3. Collaboration - I’m on the fence about this but there are were a couple of days when I would have loved to do something in collaboration with others; battle, trading, memory. Peer to peer APIs are a thing.

  4. For me one of the quirks of the weird web is that things are never finished. They are permanently under construction. If anything I didn’t let go enough, my sites were too polished, too uniform. I like the idea of a completed site but wonder if it led me to be too safe at times.

Unused Ideas

If you are considering sharing your experiences of Weird Web October, please consider sharing details of the things you abandoned. These are the ones I really want to hear about.

  • 1. Transparency - My first idea was to use the mouse pointer as a paintbrush, painting transparency onto the page and revealing something underneath. The image I had in my mind was a scratch-card. Rejected because it needed JavaScript.
  • 2. Maps - I wanted to try styling my own map. I went down a rabbit hole of tile servers, map styles, and quickly realised that there is a bunch of plumbing required to customise maps.
  • 6. Solids I wanted to let visitors bash objects together by dragging them around the screen. Again, JavaScript put me off, as did the thought of recording a quickly escalating permutations of objects hitting each other.
  • 7. Sub-optimal The nerd in me wanted to take this one somewhere familiar; sub-optimal memory usage. Just how inefficient could I make a web page if I tried. The idea was to show web page memory use as a fraction of total available memory. This isn’t possible in the browser.
  • 10. Warning The original idea wast to layer audio tracks to make a vaguely recognisable intro to the song Warning, by Green Day. I learned the piano part, nailed the pillow drumming on the sofa but timed out on putting them together.
  • 11. Camera I wanted to allow people to take photos of the sky above home, generate a signed polaroid style image, and download it to keep. I timed out on trying to proxy streaming video out to the browser. Streaming video is hard.
  • Memory I envisaged a trip through a random sequence of other Weird Web October sites and then see if you can navigate back from memory. A number of people block embedding their sites and I couldn’t think of a way to do the navigation that didn’t involve tracking.

If you want to take any of these ideas and run with them, please do. There is always room for more weird on the web. All I ask is that you let me know what you made.

Favourites

I’ll leave you with a selection of my favourites.

Maps

I’ve always loved maps that draw themselves, where plotting data points reveals something of the location. One of the first things I built with the Twitter API was a map of the UK rendered pixel at a time using the coordinates associated with each tweet. I left it running for weeks, but gradually you could start to make out a recognisable outline of the UK. I didn’t have days and Twitter is no longer. Instead I present you a map of London, generated in real time by the position of aircraft overhead.

Solids

This was a fallback idea after my first fell through. But by this point I was fixated on doing something interactive. Georgie’s image map entry gave me what I needed and I was pleased to be able to involve sound. I expected the sound from different surfaces to be more varied than it was.

Transition

I love generative art. In the past I’ve spent a time playing with Nanou with a view to printing poster sized images. This was an opportunity for me to explore CSS animation. It’s amazing what you can achieve by overlaying shapes and colours.

Bounce

A game! Can you get your mouse from ‘Start’ to ‘End’ without the bouncing blocks taking you out. This was my first real foray into using JavaScript. This was also an entry where I had to stop before fully understanding how it worked. The bouncing blocks aren’t centred and had to hide the scroll bars because I didn’t figure out how to prevent the page expanding as they bouncing blocks move off to the right. I enjoyed this one though.

Memory

This one is personal. Scroll down you contacts list and ask yourself when you last contacted or heard from everyone in the list. The list of memories was longer than I’d realised.

Empty

This was my first attempt at implementing a “user interface” in HTML and CSS. I’m proud of how this turned out. I don’t built sites for a living but seeing this one come together gave me hope that maybe I could. I really wanted to let people submit new files or publish posts they’d written from the editor. Too much for one day.

Explore The Weird Web

Rather than pick favourites, here are a few random entries from this years Weird Web October.