LOL I DREW THIS DRAGON
09/02/2011
Yet another website dreamt up in moments when I probably should have known better. Put together with a couple of guys from my course I managed to get my five minutes of fame on the internet.
The idea was simple: A website where people could upload their badly drawn pictures of dragons. On top of this we built the king of geocities esc interfaces: flashing & marquee text, animated GIFs, ball-busting MIDI tunes, spelling and gammar mistakes, "facts" pages and we even had an animated GIF tiled background in the beginning stages, but it had a bad habit of crashing browsers on computers with less RAM.
Overall the site was pretty fun. We ran a campaign around the university and various social networking sites to raise awareness. It was fairly popular for a while, bringing in a couple hundred hits a day but then one drunken night we though "fuck it" and posted a link on 4chan.
The next morning we woke up to several hundred thousand hits - the site had hit college humour front page. In a couple of days we almost breached a million before the traffic went down. Needless to say in those few stressful days I learnt a lot about preparing your site to handle a lot of traffic (mainly because ours was very much not prepared). The overall experience was great fun, but I couldn't feel complete until the other day, when I met someone who was more or less a complete stranger who had indeed heard of the website and thought it was awesome!