…and am not quite sure what’s going on…

Related Posts

• March 30, 2009 -- Purple and Red
• November 23, 2008 -- x
• October 18, 2008 -- Bears, Burgers, Bugs, Bots, etc
• October 7, 2008 -- Sketchpadville

From the home page:

CSS (short for “Cascading Style Sheets”) is the markup that makes the internet look the way it does.

CSS Killswitch works by creating a unique, inconspicuous, and innocuous stylesheet that you’ll link the potentially problematic client’s site to. Should negotiations go south and passwords get changed before you receive payment, that stylesheet can be activated to superficially black out the site, returning to you the upper hand.

When relations return and you’ve received payment, the killswitch is easily deactivated and its traces removed.

My attempt at a web killswitch was predated by a couple others, so the idea is not new. Furthermore, my CSS version is far from ideal. In fact, of all the ways to do something like this, mine is probably the easiest to diagnose and override… but it is the easiest to implement.

In less than three days, before I even publicly unveiled it to anyone outside my Twitter pool, my little experiment got about 10,000 unique visitors, was tweeted about more than 100 times, and inspired one act of blatant plagiarism:

Features

• An ID creator that lets you supply the info you want specific and randomizes the rest
• Gracefully degrading progressive-enhancements like @font-face headers and a JavaScript "Show Password" checkbox
• Hidden rick-rolls for those who try to look at things at which they oughtn’t be looking

Reactions

Reactions were mixed. Most tweets were positive. A couple were incredulous. A few were negative. The reddit discussion was lively and, surprisingly, mostly civil.

Favorite comments:

• “I think this is a great idea. How many clients do you have now that don’t know jack about coding? It’s at least one trick up your sleeve that you didn’t have before.” Source
• “With great power comes great responsibility. That being said, fuck unscrupulous clients.” Source
• “Come on, guys, how lame is that… ‘You won’t pay, I’ll black out your site’.” Source
  (Actually, that sounds pretty reasonable.)
• “Am I the only person that realised this is a joke?” Source
• “The user interface of this page is remarkable. Sign up without choosing a username or password generates the missing part. Downloading the randomly generated username/pass in a file… There are a lot of very small and nice elements in this page worth stealing in a future project- kudos.” Source

Final Thoughts

Lastly, I have never used this on any of my clients’ websites and I never intend to. Almost all of the people I’ve made sites for were very rad, savvy, intelligent people. In no way will this ever be 1% as good as a contract, and it undoubtedly has some serious ethical and legal implications. Mostly, like just about everything else I do, this was an experiment to see if I could do it.

And I guess I could? Not sure…

Link: http://csskillswitch.com/

Related Posts

• September 26, 2009 -- OneFileCMS
• January 8, 2010 -- The Misunderstoods
• October 25, 2009 -- What Page of Google Am I On?
• August 23, 2009 -- Sh-witter

The Misunderstoods are a “collection of young…well relatively young actors, comedians, filmmakers, scholars, waiters, Web PR sales associates, athletes, lovers, haters, activists, bigots, musicians, dreamers, and all around fun people.” They hail from New York and LA and recently garnered some press for an iPhone parody video they made.

Their WordPress theme is minimal, light on the kerning, and makes great use of some awkward/gnarly photography.

Features

• Three column front page to give videos and blog posts equal exposure
• Dynamic, ID-based YouTube embeds with “share” code
• Masthead banners that rotate by page

Link: http://themisunderstoods.com/

Related Posts

• June 14, 2009 -- The New Movement Theater
• April 27, 2009 -- Studio8.net
• September 26, 2009 -- OneFileCMS
• August 23, 2009 -- Sh-witter

Inyofayce, soil!

Random Posts

• November 2, 2007 -- The Worst Part About My Baby Blue Shoes
• December 4, 2008 -- iamnotagoodartist Stickers
• June 28, 2009 -- YouTube Video ID Bookmarklet
• November 7, 2009 -- My Failed Attempts to Write a Goosebumps Novel

Some were Photoshop collabs. All were animated in Flash. Click on on them to see any pixels that may have gotten cut off. My head hurts…

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• May 25, 2008 -- “Hey… You’re Not Dave Chappelle…”
• November 2, 2009 -- smokingkills.fla
• June 14, 2009 -- A 3mb Animated Gif
• April 27, 2009 -- Studio8.net

A little something something I made for work.

Bullet Points:

• Fixed navigation with jQ scrolling
• swfobject-called video player
• Gracefully degrading
• Browser size layout optimization (resize your window to see the content rearrange)
• Built with PHP and jQuery

Link: http://emergingmediainitiative.com/update/

Related Posts

• January 8, 2010 -- The Misunderstoods
• September 26, 2009 -- OneFileCMS
• August 23, 2009 -- Sh-witter
• July 31, 2009 -- Floyd

Random Posts

• November 20, 2009 -- Clients From Hell
• March 10, 2009 -- Wirebot Prototype
• September 16, 2009 -- Love, the Dragon
• March 29, 2008 -- Updating! Huzzahs!!

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• January 4, 2010 -- Droste Effect GIFs
• October 18, 2009 -- Abandoned Projects: Magnetbot
• September 19, 2009 -- Peanut Butter Jam Productions
• August 25, 2009 -- Go to Sleep!

Made by me and my co-worker Ben (who did, like, 90% of the actual work) using clay, Photoshop, and After Effects.

Related Posts

• April 8, 2008 -- Fake G&M iTV Commercial
• January 8, 2010 -- The Misunderstoods
• September 26, 2009 -- OneFileCMS
• August 23, 2009 -- Sh-witter

This is a project I’ve sort of been thinking about for a long while but just figured out how to do in the last couple days. It’s called “What Page of Google Am I On?” and is an SEO tool and web application for determining where a site ranks for a given query in Google.

Let’s say that you sell propane and propane accessories. Your website is “propanetownville.com. You put “propane accessories” (no quotes) into the keyword(s) box, “propanetownville.com” into the URL box, and submit. If none of the first page of 10 results links to your site, the next 10 are queried, and so on and so on until your listing is found or the results are exhausted. Repeat to your heart’s content!

All of this is magically accomplished with jQuery’s AJAX function and a secret dash of PHP. Oh, the cleverness of me! Muhaha!

Notable notations of note:

• Almost entirely coded in OneFileCMS, save for some more complex find-and-replacing for Google’s CSS
• IE6 Update script (More obligatory than necessary, especially with an unfortunately less savvy SEO demographic)
• Validating XHMTL
• Ads and a “Buy me a coffee” PayPal button (cuz billz don’t be paying themselves, yo)
• Share widget borrowed from OneFileCMS
• Only took me four days to develop and design
• Single page layout with a custom, jQ-positioned modal window for “About” text
• CSS3 rounded corners
• Century Gothic (aka best font ever)

Link: http://whatpageofgoogleamion.com/

Related Posts

• September 26, 2009 -- OneFileCMS
• January 8, 2010 -- The Misunderstoods
• August 23, 2009 -- Sh-witter
• July 31, 2009 -- Floyd