17-11-2003
Nuts - the winners of the 1st Annual Doodle of the Day Awards are going to have to wait a bit for their prizes until I figure out what to do... because Amazon UK say they can't find any copies of Doodle Interpretation: a Beginner's Guide!
03-11-2003
A new month, a new doodling year, a new weekday... we've got a new doodle up on the homepage - a wonderful one it is too - and so the awards can now only be accessed by going to www.doodleoftheday.co.uk/awards
or if you're already on the site click on the little graphics and links here and there that look like this:
02-11-2003
Don't forget, the winners of the 1st Annual Doodle of the Day Awards have been announced!
A year has now passed. A lot of things have happened in the last year, and a lot of things haven't happened. I'm still updating the site manually every weekday. I haven't implemented the ability to flick from doodle to doodle in the doodle popup yet. I hadn't implemented my "border art" project, which I'd planned from before we launched and sort of realised when I put doodled banner adverts in late November 2002 (with a 1 in 3 chance of appearing as opposed to the empty white border). I even tenuously announced the "border art" as an upcoming reality back in April...
Well, now I have fully implemented the plan: the original idea of Doodle of the Day was to encourage myself to doodle more often. As you all keep sending your wonderful doodles in to be displayed (and please do keep sending them in!) I have no urgent motivation to doodle often. Now I sort of do: you see, the border doodles I'm going to keep for my doodles only. That way I get to display my own doodles as often as I like without holding back your doodles at all! I'll still do the occasional one of course, as doodling in a rectangular doughnut is a little restrictive. Although restrictions always fire the imagination, to see just what you can achieve in those confines...
I'm rather looking forward to it.
Never fear though, the empty white borders I lovingly designed will still appear 50% of the time. The banner ads will appear 25% of the time, and the "border art" will appear 25% of the time. When the border art does appear, it'll randomly pick from however many border-art's I've created. At the moment there's two, so any time you visit the site you have only a 12.5% chance of one particular one, which will decrease as I add more!
01-11-2003
It's the 1st Annual Doodle of the Day Awards today! Check out the winners now!
In other news, October is over. We had over 2000 visitors that month! That's an average of 87 people looking at your doodle if your doodle was displayed in October!
31-10-2003
Well, well, well. I know which doodle will be the doodle of the year this year. I know the 2nd and 3rd places too. It was tough, but I'm satisfied with the result - no doubts or uncertainties. These are the best. And you can find out what they are tomorrow, Saturday the 1st of November 2003.
30-10-2003
Two days left. Stage 2 is now complete (obviously we knew what doodles we were having today and tomorrow) - all that remains is for us to pick a 1st, 2nd and 3rd from the twelve monthly winners! I've got the top 3 whittled down to an unsorted eight. More whittling is obviously required!
29-10-2003
Just a few days to go. I've renamed 'best doodle of the year' to 'The 1st Annual Doodle of the Day awards'. Also, stage 1 is complete, but those results are a secret, and always shall be! It wasn't too hard - rather fun actually - but stage 2 is bloody hard: I started it earlier, and ended up torn between 2 winners for most months! I'll approach it again tomorrow with a fresh set of eyes. Hopefully picking 3 overall winners won't be too hard. Please, please please...
Oh, and there will be prizes for the winners. They won't quite arrive in time, but then no awards ceremony goes without a hitch!
23-10-2003
Just noticed a typo on the homepage: an obviously absent hyphen. It's only been like that for nearly a year. Whoops.
03-10-2003
The 'best doodle of the year' - a surprising number of you mailed in asking about how this is going to work and expressing some fears about October entries - well, this should clear it all up:
Stage 1 (the most important): we pick the best doodle from every week (a week being confined to it's month, so there may be some 3 day weeks followed by a 4 day week). This ensures that entries in October - even down to the last day - have just as much consideration as entries in January. The results of the weekly best will not be published (we're not doing a top 60 chart!) in the interest of fairness: doodle quality may vary from one week to the next, so week 12 may have all mediocore doodles and so a medicore winner, whereas week 13 may have all excellent doodles we're forced to pick 1 from. If we published this, more deserving doodles than some shown may not be properly represented!
Stage 2: we group the weekly best by their month and pick 1 winner for each month (November 2002 - October 2003 inclusive). If one person wins more than one month we only use 1 doodle (the best) from them, and then pick a new winner for the month(s) that lost. These results will be published. This is why we confined weeks to their month, and as a result why there's 59 weeks in our year rather than 52!
Stage 3: we pick an overall winner. The remaining 11 will not be sorted into ranked order (although we may honour a 2nd and 3rd place), but sorted by month.
Stage 4: we publish the results on the homepage over the 1st and 2nd of November (a weekend), and accessible from the October archive, November news and the banner-ad version of the site borders. A link, graphic and other details will be emailed out to various news and designer websites. Details of prizes are yet to be announced: there may not be any prizes as we may not have the contact details of the winners, or be able to track them down through other means!
Good luck everyone! - ferret@doodleoftheday.co.uk
02-10-2003
September is over - we had over 2500 people visit over the month. On average that's 115 people looking at each days doodle - that's another good increase! Keep coming back, we've got some great doodles for you this month, plus our 1st anniversary coming up, on which we'll announce our favourite doodles from the entire 12 months!
30-09-2003
Our new fibre optic connection is well and truly up and stable, so it's business as usual again. Sorry if there were any problems (like this weekend, for example!), but if you missed anything just check out our updated archive.
23-09-2003
Having some trouble with our Internet connection. It works on and off at a slow crawl (boo), so it's being replaced with fibre optics (hurrah) but until then I'm not 100% confident I'll be able to manually update doodle of the day every day (especially while they're switching over from copper to optics). So until the fibre optic line is installed, we're going to crappy automated doodle of the day (I'll keep the archive updated daily if possible). Shouldn't be too long though.
01-09-2003
I've just (finally) updated the archive to include the doodles on the 22nd, 25th and 26th of August (my period of absence). And now August is over too, so here are the stats:
Well over 1700 visitors in August, with over 82 unique visitors looking at every doodle on it's day.
And today is the first weekday of the month, so today's doodle goes to the wonderful Emma once more. In 139 days, I'll be seeing her in Australia - the plane tickets are booked :-)
27-08-2003
I'm back and the homepage is normal once more - I'll be updating the archive later today to include the 3 doodles from the last 5 days.
22-08-2003
I'm away this bank holiday weekend, so the site will be automated until Wednesday.
06-08-2003
Hmm, although Gareth's idea is very simple, implementing it is actually going to be quite hard. It'll mean a fair re-write of how the backend of doodle of the day works, although this will probably take us one step closer to proper database integration, so I'll do it anyway. But it'll take a little while.
05-08-2003
About a month ago I took delivery of 250 cards like this one:
05-08-2003
Stats for July are a bit of an improvement: we had over 2000 visitors that month, so roughly 90 different people looked at each doodle! Also, Gareth has had an excellent idea that I'll be implementing tonight - more on that when it launches.
25-07-2003
Sorry about the delay - the archive is now up-to-date with Thursday/Friday/Monday's doodles. Do check them out - they're goodun's.
25-07-2003
Just noticed I forgot to delete the "news" graphic on the left when I started relegating old news into years and put a "news archive" graphic above the years: instead of saying just "news archive" it said "news news archive". It's been like that for over a month. Oops.
I've stuck the old news title at the top of the current news page... doesn't look to cluttered and I think it's important to know this is current news and you've not wandered solely into the archived news somehow when entering this section (and similarly put the "news archive" graphic in archived news to make it consistent). Tidied up the left a bit too - the margin spacing was too big. So much to say about so little. Swapped today's two news items around, as the archive one is infinitely more interesting than this item!
22-07-2003
I'm back - the homepage is normal once more, and I've updated the comments too (but not the archive).
17-07-2003
I'm away Friday and Monday, so the site will be automated. When I get back, my girlfriend will be on the other side of the globe - permenantly! Not sure what's going to happen now, but that's a subject for my journal, not here.
11-07-2003
June ended a while ago and we had around 1800 visitors for that month, so roughly 87 different people looked at every doodle published in that month.
30-06-2003
I'm back and all moved to my new bachelor pad (and very poor from now on as a result - new higher rent). The homepage is back to normal and the comments have been posted. If you had trouble accessing doodles these last few days then check out the archive now!
26-06-2003
I'm not around on Friday as I'm moving flats (all of 4 doors from my current place). This means we'll be running on the semi-automated version of the site until sometime Monday morning GMT. Hmmm, I must get this site automated properly! Much as I enjoy updating it manually daily (and - funnily - I do) what if I was to fall ill? Also I know some of you have trouble with the automated version, especially if your computer's clocks are not set properly (obviously).
23-06-2003
I'm back! The homepage is back to reliable manually-updated, and the comments have been posted. If you had trouble accessing Friday and Monday's doodles (and Friday's over the weekend of course) then check out the archive now - they were great!
19-06-2003
I've swapped some of the main navigation around. Instead of being "Home News Archive" it's now "Home Archive News" as Will just told me he presumed it was a News Archive rather than two separate areas: Archived doodles and News. Hopefully that'll clear things up a bit (although I never guessed there might have been a problem).
Also, Doodle of the Day will be automated until Tuesday AM GMT as I'm in Paris for the next 4 days. Oh-La-La! I'm going with my girlfriend, so who knows: maybe many magnificent doodles will be created on the Eurostar - it's been far too long since I had one of my own doodles on the site. Oh yes: comments will not be added until Tuesday, but please do send them in.
13-06-2003
Quite happy with myself: we've been going for over 6 months now and thanks to excessive file optimising on my part (both with code and graphics, including your weekdaily submitted doodles) I've used just:
- 10mb of disk space while hosting 162 doodles
- 2.4gb of data transfered since launch despite having around 32,000 visitors since launch
So I think we've all done rather well!
04-06-2003
Big change in the Archive from today. Now if you point your mouse at a day the title and author of the doodle will appear below the calendar. I did this mainly because some browsers don't bother displaying alt-tags (where that information previously resided), so for a lot of you the Archive was probably a pain to use. Not anymore - check it out now!
For anyone interested, it's all done with div-tags and a tiny scrap of javascript. It was a bit of a dull slog, but I stayed up 'till midnight last night and got the rest done while half-watching a program I might have been in but wasn't (roll on Thursday night - that one's a given). And today is my girlfriends birthday, so today the doodle of the day is hers.
03-06-2003
We had around 2000 visitors over May, roughly 89 per doodle. That's slightly up on last month, but not enough! I did some promoting, but not as much as I intend to. Anyway... coming soon, a big improvement in the Archive for all you people whose browsers (or patience) does not support ALT tags! It's slow dull work, but it'll be well worth it once it's done.
27-05-2003
Folk at the Necksis web design community have linked to us - it's always highly appreciated
19-05-2003
I've made some of the code more efficient - nothing that you should notice by visiting the site though, except some pages may load slightly faster. No, I've not set up a database yet but I have stripped out a lot of repetitive code from the popup titles and comments. Unfortunately my hosting service doesn't support server-side includes due to security reasons, so I've cheated and used javascript includes instead that contain document writes. I've also moved the comments and titles to their own directories, as the directory of doodles had nearly a thousand files in it up until then, and therefore slow to load when I was looking in it.
06-05-2003
April is well over, and we had around 1900 visitors for that month, roughly 87 visitors per doodle. I think it's time to promote the site to new sources, and whack those visitor numbers back up to increase the size of our regular audience!
29-04-2003
I've added about 21 new art and design books to the doodled amazon.com banner-ad you sometimes see (a 1 in 3 chance - or click here) at the top of Doodle of the Day. The code picks three books at random, and of course you can click through and buy them from Amazon if you're interested. I know Doodle of the Day is for doodles and not books, but I can always do with making a few quid here and there. And besides, I enjoyed writing the code (worked first time!) drawing a new banner and scrawling out all those book titles (and scanning them in, for my sins) - so it was good for me at least!
Expect something new cropping up in the borders of Doodle of the Day soon too (which I metioned months ago - and is why you have a 1 in 3 chance of seeing the banner ads, not 1 in 2).
24-04-2003
I'm back! The homepage is back to reliable manually-updated, although I'll only get round to adding your emailed comments to the last weeks doodles later today. However the archive is now up-to-date for that period, so if you had trouble accessing last weeks doodles (and it transpires you would have had trouble at the weekend - my fault entirely) then head there now - some were very good indeed!
17-04-2003
I'm away for a bit, but doodle of the day will continue on ropey automatic. There will be a new doodle every weekday, but you won't see it's title and author until you click it into it's new window. Comments will not be added until Thursday, but please do send them in. Likewise the Archive will not be updated until Thursday either. If you do have trouble viewing the doodles, you can always come back on Thursday and check out the Archive!
07-04-2003
Things may be a bit slow today as our hosting provider is having network problems. Mind you, that means you probably won't waste valuable downloading time loading this page.
04-04-2003
We had around 2200 visitors over March, roughly 106 per doodle. So if you had a doodle up in March, 106 people took a look at it!
27-03-2003
Mail is working fine now. Mail away!
26-03-2003
Having trouble with our email today - any doodles or comments you try to send will probably fail to reach us. The problem will definitely be solved in 24 hours time, so please hold off until tomorrow.
04-03-2003
Added this news section today, although as you can see there is retrospective news back to the inception of the site (I kept notes [mainly in my head] and I could have launched it in January, but couldn't be arsed). As you probably won't want to read through all this, I'll repeat the most important point: if you didn't get to see the doodles of the day over Christmas then I heartily recommend you check them out in the archive - there was some sterling stuff.
03-03-2003
We had around 2500 visitors over February, roughly 125 per doodle (I've just realised this is a much better way of calculating visitors! Each month there can be a different number of weekdays, therefore a different number of doodles, and so that's the only ratio that really matters - hmm, better go back through the news and calculate past months too at some point)
14-02-2003
Yes, it's valentines day. Yes, I've put up one of my girlfriends doodles which is in a heart shape. I don't know if that was intentional on her part but it's from the old batch: it wasn't drawn especially for today or anything.
03-02-2003
We had around 3000 visitors over January, roughly 130 per doodle
25-11-2003
I've doodled a new interactive button advert for the upcoming Harry Potter book. No-one seems to be purchasing it yet according to my affiliate logs, or is that just because it's a pre-order and so won't show up until the release date? Not that it matters one way or the other.
16-01-2003
We've popped up on yahoo.com again, this time in the X of the Day section!
15-01-2003
Your emailed comments on the doodles from over the christmas break have (finally) been made live - check them out in the archive.
13-01-2003
We had around 2900 visitors over December, roughly 132 per doodle
10-01-2003
The Christmas break is now well and truly over and we're getting back into the swing of things. Unsurprisingly the number of visitors dipped over the christmas period - if you didn't get to see the doodles of the day in the last few weeks I heartily recommend you check them out in the archive - there was some sterling stuff.
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