Or don’t.
I always forgot about this domain, but smile when I see the renewal notice from Reclaim Hosting. They gave it to me in 2014 as a twitter contest to pick a novel vanity name. It’s one of the few contests I’ve ever won, for tweeting my idea– dontlookatmy.photos (see the requisite explanatory blog post).
Actually it was good I checked as the site was broken! My 2014 code was mixing some remote scripts via http:// rather than https:// so it was busted for mixed content sources.
So I fixed that…
The idea is to do the opposite of flickr’s Explore or Interestingness, to try to find some of the obscure photographers in the mix. The whole thing is a bit of duct tape JavaScript tapping into the flickr API. Every hour a server script updates the site’s single page to find a new photographer to feature.The method involves the flickr API to look for 500 photos tagged either “dull”, “bland”, “boring” or “ugly” and sort them in order of increasing “interestingness” (flickr’s formula). So I am finding the “least” interesting tagged photo to select the featured account for an hour. Then the site pulls 20 of their photos to show.
It’s not quite the perfect method for finding some of the most obscure flickr photos, but in the vein of web shaping, it works great. I make use of the always handy jQuery Backstretch plugin for filling the background with an image and the flickr API called via Javascript to snag he data for the person’s stream. The changing of pictures is really taped together, it could be done with less overhead by using the Backstretch slideshow mode.
That’s code for another day.
While this domain and site serve no real cosmic purpose, it certainly amuses me. If anyone wants the secret link kick it over to another person, I will share.
More importantly this is the tech shaping stuff that makes me most happy in my web tinkering. Thanks Reclaim Hosting for giving me dontlookatmy.photos but please, for your own sanity, do not click, do not look.
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