Anyone familiar with the web will know that it doesn’t matter how great your backup, recreating all that from backup files is a nightmare.

To put it bluntly I was pretty depressed about the whole thing, toyed with just giving up. “If people want to have links to viagra sites that badly that they trash sites I’m doing for free with no personal gain, I just give up” were my thoughts.

Well it turned out that 3 hours of work this evening after work, and I’ve got teh site back up. The image sample feature (that was in extreme alpha) has been removed – for fear it might be the back door they used. Not sure how or when I’ll add that back in, sorry if you liked the feature.

There is no guarantee that by tomorrow morning EST, I won’t have been hacked again, if that happens, I’m unsure what to do… but rest assured, I’m planning on trying to keep this site running as long as I can.

Totally side note, I’m planning on allow people to post to hexday via Twitter – without need for an actual Hexday account.

Once the feature is live, simply posting to twitter a message that includes @hexday and a valid hex value starting with a #, and the hexday app will add that color, against that twitter user name. So still only 1 a day (we’ll ignore any additional ones) and you’ll still be able to see all the posts by a person. I thought it would be an interesting input mechanism. Still a lot of work to go – like code it, but I’ll keep things updated.

Thanks for your patience whilst we sort all this stuff out and have a great hexday !

One of my oldest and dearest web apps reached 1 year old today. Hexday was launched Nov. 6th 2007 and has now been going for a full year. Funnily enough, as you can see for the screen shot above, the first 6 months were a little slow, we averaged maybe 4 or 5 color picks a day. The last 3 months have been really awesome, with an average of 40 picks a day by some dedicated regulars – many thanks to all of them, they are making the experiment what it is.

Some news, this weekend I will be working on finishing off the 1st Hexday Book. The book will cover the last 50 days of this year, and will have a page per day with an index of users and hex values. I will be publishing on demand through blurb and will post more details once it’s ready and I have one printed and photographed. I’m very excited and consider the site a success for no other reason than I can publish this book for every color loving coffee table. The top 5 posters on Hexday will be recieving a complementary copy for their dedication. I’m planning on printing one of these books on a regular basis, just need to try and work out the logistics.

CIELAB is the brainchild of Steve Mason (www.smason.com), a brilliant flying-under-the-radar talent. CIELAB, along with other similar tools like Kuler, give us a new way to look at and experience color. However, CIELAB is on a whole different plane, laying waste to Kuler. Steve’s currently at Obscura Digital, and worked at both Odopod and Bionic Arts prior to Obscura. I don’t know what his title is…’cause he kinda shatters categories. He’s a designer, coder, musician, mathematician, and general brain.

Via Surfstation

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to start compiling the first edition of the Hexday Book.

My idea is to take a block of data and convert it into book format, and make it available via print on demand for people to buy. The idea is to create a coffee table book that might interest people.

More info to come, but now that we have 72 days worth of very solid pick volume the first edition will be the 50 days following that date. Watch here for details.

—-

ps. sorry I’ve been a little quiet recently, I had two other pet projects launch that required a great deal of energy, I’ve also been totally swamped at work. But I promise I still have features that will be coming to hexday, it’s just a matter of fitting them all into the meager 24 hours we’ve been given each day.

Couple of things I couldn’t work out, how or if the color picker can be directly linked to the color you’re picking – I ended up copy and pasting the hex values and if the values are ever actually stored anywhere. If Sam’s interested I’d be happy to add a link to hexday for users to jump to a page that has their last 5 colors in order, obviously I don’t want to just link to the image page, I’d love to be able to link to the main page, and then have the user be able to pick the size or change colors if they wanted to.

Hexday was started on November 6th 2007.

That day we had 3 posts:

1. JP (me) picked a fairly flat green
2. Tom picked white
3. Jim and Chompski both picked black

Since that date there have been:

168 people sign up for hexday
1,109 colorpicks made
27,285 hex values added to the system
539 images sampled
65,000 page views
7,300 unique visitors



Only 33% of visitors have been using a Mac, 62% where using Firefox, over 70% had a screen resolution larger than 1280×1024.

The most searched on colors that ended up at the site were:

1. #0e1f23
2. #ffccff
3. #282828
4. #f2f2f2

The top ten most prolific users have selected:

1. JP – 232
2. Tom – 120
3. Cryptoskunks – 85
4. SykesUK – 45
5. Eric – 43
6. Pabranch – 39
7. JerseyCat40 – 33
8. David – 32
9. Jim – 23
10. RickD – 22

One of the features I’m working on is more stats views, so I’ll be looking at automating these sorts of stats, for overall, last month, last week. Both looking at analyzing users and also colors. What a chart that shows which colors you pick at what time of the day, stats that show if you’re more likely to pick a red color on a tuesday and a light color at a weekend, that’s the sort of things I’m aiming for.

For now, I’d like to say a big thanks to everyone mentioned above, what I like to think of as the hexday “founders”, and once again a big welcome to all the new users who have joined in the last few weeks, we’re now averaging about

]]> http://blog.hexday.com/post/state-of-the-union/39/feed 0 http://blog.hexday.com/post/080808/37 http://blog.hexday.com/post/080808/37#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:01:49 +0000 JP http://blog.hexday.com/?p=37 I wonder how many people will pick #080808 today for their hexday pick, by way of a nod to the Olympics.

#080808

For those looking for some alternatives, below are the Official Colors of the 2008 Olympics.

Chinese Red

The Glaze Yellow

Chinese Scholar-tree Green

The Blue-and-White Porcelain Blue

The Great Wall Grey

The Jade White

]]> http://blog.hexday.com/post/080808/37/feed 1 http://blog.hexday.com/post/cymbolism/33 http://blog.hexday.com/post/cymbolism/33#comments Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:42:39 +0000 JP http://blog.hexday.com/?p=33

This is a great idea, give words and allow users to select colors that they feel represent those colors. Show the results aggregated and the most often picked colors. The data being collected will be very interesting, looking for patterns and relationships. It’s a wonderfully simple site, easy to use and clearly defined. Only issue I had was not knowing I needed to scroll down to see the results.

What does brooklyn mean to you?


Compared to Georgian?



It really is a nice idea. I’ll be keeping an eye open for an API. It would be great to be able to associate hexday colors with their most picked words.

]]> http://blog.hexday.com/post/cymbolism/33/feed 4 http://blog.hexday.com/post/kylie-does-hexday/28 http://blog.hexday.com/post/kylie-does-hexday/28#comments Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:38:52 +0000 JP http://blog.hexday.com/?p=28 I got some interesting pictures from my cousin, who had endured a Kylie Minogue concert out of love for his fiancée.

The things one has to do for ones lady!

Crap songs but the visuals where amazing she had a wall and floor which was one massive screen at one point it all got a bit hexday!







It is rather uncanny, obviously it’s not using or based on hexday. Although it would be rather cool if the strips had been based on that days hexday picks, and they changed as she toured. It’s a great coincidence. Thanks to David for sending me the pix.

If you see something that looks hexday, send me a picture or a link and I’ll post it up.

]]> http://blog.hexday.com/post/kylie-does-hexday/28/feed 0 http://blog.hexday.com/post/color-api/32 http://blog.hexday.com/post/color-api/32#comments Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:31:56 +0000 JP http://blog.hexday.com/?p=32 After all the attention from ColorLovers this weekend, and a recent read of a Tim O’Reilly article, I found myself thinking about how I could participate in the “open web”. I’m already looking at opening an API (initially just GET) so that people can use the data from Hexday outside of it’s confines, but I should also really try to also participate in other open data sharing if such things exist. So I was very excited to find that colourLovers has an API, and Kuler has one that returns RSS.

I’m going to be thinking very hard about how I would integrate with them, yet keep the identity of hexday very separate, whilst most importantly have it be beneficial to users of hexday. I’ll maybe post some ideas before I go ahead with anything. If anyone can think of other places to “mashup” with, I’d love to hear.

]]> http://blog.hexday.com/post/color-api/32/feed 1