What is the most unusual thing on your site? What would a tour guide point out?

[WraithGlade]

Hello everyone! It's been a long time since I last posted on Melonland, mostly because I am always overextending myself and trying to "do all the things" to the point of undermining myself ironically. Sorry about that, though I'm sure I'll do it again... repeatedly, heh  ... so many shiny objects.

Anyway though, I had an idea of something potentially interesting to ask:

What is the thing on your site (if anything) that a tour guide or archeologist would point out as being the most unusual or notable, the thing most like an eye-popping landmark or cultural signifier?

Think of things like the Moai heads of Easter Island (the same thing as I chose for this thread's forum icon) or the Eiffel Tower or Stonehenge, etc. 

I'll go first:

My site's "Journal and Changelog" page (which I have updated consistently every day (though occasionally belatedly) since the 1st day I made my site) has one single HTML list for every day's entry and contains over 34,000 words of text and is 293 kilobytes (over a quarter of a megabyte) of just pure text.

For point of comparison, a typical novel is estimated at ~50,000 words and I may reach that volume by the end of the year at this rate. It's the single largest individual HTML list element I've ever seen on any site (as far as I am aware). It is so large in fact that I worry a bit that it may get my site (or that page) marked as something strange (perhaps to be avoided) by algorithms some day, heh  .

The page also has ~1,000 outgoing HTML links in it, probably ~60-70% of which are to Wikipedia alone... Indeed, one may joke that whatever my supposed theme as a webmaster allegedly is, my real theme is linking repeatedly to Wikipedia in my log.

So, a tour guide to my site would perhaps point to the extremely large list in my Journal and Changelog page as the landmark that sticks out the most. Perhaps an archeologist might theorize about what madness drove its creation. 

The real reason (incidentally) is that when I first created my site the daily updates I made became ever increasingly more of a point of pride and a streak that I thus feel disinclined to break... and hence here we are months later, with a nearly novel-length daily log.

Anyway though, that's mine. (Please excuse my incurable verbosity, as usual.)

More importantly though, what are yours? I'm curious about what the answers may be. 

[alexela64]

Definitely my soon-to-be-interactive j-rock/fashion page. It's a bit hidden, but it's my favorite page by far.

[WraithGlade]

That's some creative and distinctive use of scroll bars and image layout! I don't know how you did it.

(Admittedly, I suppose my lack of knowledge is unsurprising considering my site is still text-only even after over half a year. Indeed, I've been thinking of perhaps adding an image or two somewhere finally somewhere on my own site soon.)

I appreciate your response!

[wygolvillage]

Clovenglade, my interactive shrine/game/whatever it is based on old horse games I used to play that died with the Flash player. It's my highest effort project and I think it ended up pretty unique as far as shrines go. I think a tour guide might point out my garden page as well.

[Audball]

I think it either has to be the ever-changing footer at the bottom of my site (I try to add funny new phrases to it every so often!) or perhaps "the house." Theres a random chance you'll get redirected to an edited picture I took in an abandoned house in the south. Just there to be creepy really (and also kinda funny, at least I think so. just a website saying "music page? You mean you wanna go to THE HOUSE!" is really funny to me.)

[WraithGlade]

Cool stuff wygolvillage and Audball! 

wygolvillage: I liked the pastel color and correspondingly soft feeling layout (e.g. rounded corners on boxes, narrow readable text column, etc) of the Clovenglade page. The garden has nice pixel art and I especially liked that each plant lead to another page with descriptive info! Use of Melonking's flooding script is a cool idea too and fits thematically.

Audball: The glitchy aesthetic of your site is really well done and the badge list also was well laid out. I wasn't able to find "The House" but I suppose there's no surprise there since you said it is randomized.

[candycanearter07]

I feel like maybe the "time-zone" page? I feel like my site is kinda boring otherwise ^^

[WraithGlade]

Using an RGB color triplet/vector as a format for accumulating time is quite a fresh and clever idea! I've never seen that before on any site!   

I also really liked the goo creature that follows the user's mouse cursor around! 

The scanline effect and the general layout of the whole site is also cool. 

[Audball]

Audball: The glitchy aesthetic of your site is really well done and the badge list also was well laid out. I wasn't able to find "The House" but I suppose there's no surprise there since you said it is randomized.

Thank you! Yeah it's a random chance on any page to happen. I think right now the odds are approx. 1 in 20?? Unsure really. It's tied to the same script that does the random footer, if the random number generator hits a specific number it'll redirect to the house. The actual house in real life was interesting to go through. Had TONS of copies of some tree identification book from the 70s littering the floor.

[wygolvillage]

wygolvillage: I liked the pastel color and correspondingly soft feeling layout (e.g. rounded corners on boxes, narrow readable text column, etc) of the Clovenglade page. The garden has nice pixel art and I especially liked that each plant lead to another page with descriptive info! Use of Melonking's flooding script is a cool idea too and fits thematically.

Thank you!!! (FWIW the pixel art in the Garden is from the pet site Flowergame, I use the Garden page to show off my collection from that site :))

[candycanearter07]

Using an RGB color triplet/vector as a format for accumulating time is quite a fresh and clever idea! I've never seen that before on any site!   

I also really liked the goo creature that follows the user's mouse cursor around! 

The scanline effect and the general layout of the whole site is also cool. 

the rgbeat thing was kinda stolen from melon lol
the goo creature is a goomy (pokemon) and the code was stolen from a nekoweb site
the scanline image is just an overlay i stole from this steam game progressbar95

[WraithGlade]

if the random number generator hits a specific number it'll redirect to the house. The actual house in real life was interesting to go through. Had TONS of copies of some tree identification book from the 70s littering the floor.

Incidentally, I looked at the site again and at least found the photo album for The House, including the litter of tree identification book copies. That's pretty cool! I like obscurities. If I had to guess, it could be the house's owner was the author of that book or was given a bunch of copies by a relative of theirs who wrote it. That'd seem like the most plausible reason why someone would have so many copies of it. It might actually be the best lead to figuring out who used to live there.

Also, thank you wygolvillage and candycanearter07 for the extra contextual info!

With my new plans to finally start gradually adding art to my site maybe one day my site will be as interesting to look at as some of you guys' sites. After more than 6 months of being a text-only site (except the Neocities logo) I've started adding a bit of decorative art at long last, uploaded just yesterday.

Anyway, I really appreciating you guys taking the time to respond to my question.

Have a wonderful day/night/week everyone, as always!

[Audball]

Incidentally, I looked at the site again and at least found the photo album for The House, including the litter of tree identification book copies. That's pretty cool! I like obscurities. If I had to guess, it could be the house's owner was the author of that book or was given a bunch of copies by a relative of theirs who wrote it. That'd seem like the most plausible reason why someone would have so many copies of it. It might actually be the best lead to figuring out who used to live there.

This thread is actually what inspired me to add the photos section! I wanted a place for people to see the actual, unedited photo I use for the easter egg, as well as some other photos I've taken on my journeys. Thank you for checking it out!

I went to your page as well to see what's up and the first thing I come across is a Doom 2 level?!?!?! I've been going through those old "D!ZONE" and "DOOM HEAVEN" CD's that are just jampacked with random WADs they pulled from BBSes back in the day so this came at the most opportune time! Gonna check that out! Definitely something I would point out as a tour guide (if only because I can't contain myself when it comes to stuff like that).

[WraithGlade]

Thanks Audball! Yeah, Doom is such a cool old game. It's one of my favorite retro games and still has a very active modding community. I remember those old WAD CDs full of doom maps too! Good times! 


Also, thank you to everyone else who has replied to my thread as well! I am still curious what unusual things are out there that I've not yet seen. This is my first time back in the thread in a few days.

I wanted to let it soak a bit to see if more responses would roll in.

Anyway, have an awesome day/night/etc everyone, as always! 

[malice]

Ooh, I had to think about this for a bit 

For my main site, I'd say it would be the Random Evanescence Fact Generator on the homepage. It's the only time I used Javascript and it seems quite out of place, especially if it's your first time on my site and you don't know about my love for the band.

I'm not sure what that would be for the Evanescence archive site, perhaps that it has a very light, cutesy theme at the moment which in no way reflects the mood of the band unless you knew that it was based on the journal Amy wrote the lyrics to Fallen in. The site used to be a lot moodier and Evanescence-ish until earlier today when I decided to turn the secondary theme into the main theme until I eventually redo the old theme so it uses iframes.