The Hawk Times

Social Experiment: Color My IP

Zach Bush — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:52:26 +0000

It is February 19, 2009, late in the afternoon when I realize an interesting use of IP addresses, by using the first three numbers of the IP and converting them to RGB, I realized that I could generate a unique color for anyone who visited the site. At the time I only thought of it as an interesting php exercise, however in the ten or so minutes that I took me to write this page I decided to try something irrational.

I put this page up on my website and submitted it to stumbleupon.

I thought little of it, until I returned an hour or so later to find that I had received over 300 hits. I figured my counter must be broken (it actually was, but that’s not important) so I rushed back to stumbleupon to check on the page. I had already received 4 comments, mostly commenting on the stupidity of the whole thing, but there were already a full list of people who had added it to their favorites, and the page was rated at 5 stars. I could barely believe what was happening, a site that I spent 10 minutes on has already achieved more exposure than a site I spent hundreds of hours designing. I went to sleep thinking that it was just an anomaly, but when I awoke, the pageviews had grown. untold thousands of people had visited my site (this is where the broken counter comes in, it would reset the count if two people visited the site at the same time).

Two months later the hitcount stands at 17742 Pageviews and 69 comments on the site. As it would seem, the likeleyhood of a page becoming popular is inversely proportional to the amount of effort that went into it. Visit Site

Nutition Hawk Updates

Zach Bush — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:41:13 +0000

10/16/08: Fixed the Babyfood search problem, will only show babyfood if queried for. must fix if searching for brand of baby food.

Nutrition Hawk Updates

Zach Bush — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 05:30:44 +0000

10/13/08: submitted site for google adsense

Hawk Update

Zach Bush — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:39:19 +0000

10/12/08: Fixed DB to make searches non case sensitive

10/11/08: Added about and Contact Page to Wordpress

Nutrition Hawk Changes

Zach Bush — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:34:34 +0000

10/10/08: Added Wordpress News Blog. submitted sites to Google Analytics.

10/9/08: Website is nearly complete; updated the search page to include a header with links and a search box. Fixed IE compatibility issue.

10/8/08: Fixed a signifigant amount of CSS. Not working correctly in IE

10/6/08: Created PHP Search code to make DB accessed dynamic pages. finished uploading DB.

10/5/08: started uploading the USDA Database rev 21.