eBlots is back, kinda.
I'm working on porting the web site over to an app for Android, and thought it would be fun to put the site online for a bit in order to test it and gather some samples.
Fine, I'll explain. I suppose it was ten years ago. TEN YEARS. I don't know how that happened. Anyway.. I was working at Plural, and I had a Palm of some sort. Probably a Palm V, which was of course the best and coolest Palm *ever*. And whenever I had a moment of boredom I'd just draw a little doodle and save it. We'd been light on work (closed later that summer) and I'd been churning out ridiculous little web sites (guidsquirt, flarben, etc.) and coming up with some interesting ideas. eBlots was one of them. Just the idea of Rorschach charts and sharing opinions...
So I whip up eblots.. (no, I still don't know if it's eblots or eBlots) Dropped the link on a site or two but really just enjoyed doing it. Was fun coding, fun drawing the doodles, and most of all fun to put my comment in daily and see what other folks thought.
Yahoo sites of the week, mention on CNN news, many many many linkblogs, and lots of traffic. I'd promised never to put ads on it, and I'm still glad I did that. The couple hundred dollars I might have made wouldn't have been worth the thought that I kept it "pure" -- although I did open a cafepress store if folks wanted a t-shirt or something. :) I got to watch 1400 connections pour in at one moment and that was a lot of fun -- even handled the volume! Woo!
It was a lot of fun, and after a while it sort of petered out. After the year anniversary the images rolled over and somehow, as unbelievable as it sounds, a couple folks complained about the "reruns" -- what a memory! Eventually I retired it and stopped paying for the domain.
It's one of the few sites I'm really proud of because I enjoyed it and it was enjoyed by other folk.
So now I'm building a version for Android phones(*). Maybe I'll let someone write an iPhone version if I get a cut of the profits. Just kidding! eblots will always be free.
So if you want to hit the site you can play along and see a new image every day, comment on it, and see what other people thought...
