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.

Thursday just as I was leaving the office for an extended weekend at the beach I received an email from David at the Colourlovers blog. He wanted to do an email interview about hexday and would I be interested.

I have a huge amount of respect for the guys over at colourlovers. When I first started hexday I made distinct decisions that would mean I wouldn’t “compete” with them. As weird as it sounds, they are to colors what google is to web searching. So I was VERY humbled that they wanted to email interview me and feature me on the blog. So I replied.

3 days later, the blog post appeared, and as I expected there has since then being a huge spike in the number of visitors. I welcome 1 and all, it’s exciting to find more people who find this experiment interesting and worth the time.

Monday August 4th:

I’m very happy that hopefully I’ve inherited some long term members – I haven’t seen a downturn yet, which is great. I’ve also noticed in my google analytics that a few other places have picked up hexday and blogged or mentioned it favorable, again I’m very greatly for that, I’ll be compiling those locations soon and will put up a page that links to “people talking about hexday”.

I’ve also been very happy with the comments over at hexday they all seem positive which again is great, I’m glad people are liking what we’re doing here.

Final thing to come out of this, is that I’ve had a couple of API requests in the last few days, so I’ve promoted the API feature on my list of To Do’s to next after some clean up I need to do. I’ll post more on that very soon (this weekend I hope). My plan initially is to provide a simple get API that will allow access to general, user and date based color picks in JSON, CSV and XML formats. Later on I’ll look at adding a POST API so if people really wanted they could write apps or mashups to post color picks for users.

All in all, it’s been an exciting couple of days, I’m very happy with the new volume, I’m glad people are liking it, and if anyone has any input please don’t hesitate to email me, or leave a comment here. jp AT hexday DOT COM.

Then I remembered I’d emailed some info out about some of the recent feature updates to some design blogs I subscribe to personally. Yes indeed, dirtymouse.co.uk had run a post on Hexday – welcome to all the visitors from there, I hope you enjoy the site and come back tomorrow.

While I was poking around look at my google stats, one thing seemed very weird. Dirty Mouse ran the post today, yet yesterday’s stats were over 400 unique visitors and they all seemed to be coming from France – something else was going on.

It seems from digging through the logs that there is a Swedish Counter Strike Clan that is using a hex color value as their team name 0E1F23. They “launched” yesterday, and it seems in almost every location where they announced their start, someone asked them what the name meant and then someone linked to that color on hexday. It means in the last 24 hours #0E1F23 has had over 500 unique visits, mainly from European online gaming clan sites and forums. Hello to everyone on the 0E1F23 team, it’s a great color to pick – if you want to email me a link or something, I’ll add a reference it on that page for you.

Last Big day was Novemeber 14th 2007:

Today:

Update: Well we have the heady count of 16 picks for today. That’s the most of any day every in the 270 day history of Hexday. Big thank you to old and new users. Hope to see you all tomorrow.