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.

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/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/day-trends-best-month-ever/24 http://blog.hexday.com/post/day-trends-best-month-ever/24#comments Tue, 29 Jul 2008 02:57:06 +0000 JP http://blog.hexday.com/?p=24 Well I know it’s not like the site gets 20,000 picks a day, but I have to say I’m really happy with how everything is coming along. The last hex month has seen some of the best traffic, we have some new and regular users (hello to you all), and what I really like is that each day almost has a theme. Some days people want to do there own thing, and that is totally cool – it often leads to the best picks – but some days you just get a feeling that everyone comes to the site and says “you know what I like where today is going, I’m going to keep with that”. It’s weird because it’s not like we have days were everyone picks green or grays, but days like today, all the colors just fit together (at least at time of writing they did .

Today is a sort of muted yet vibrant day…




yesterday was a very blue darker flatter day (I suspect the storms in the North East contributed to that….




The month as a whole has been great:



Looking forward, I’m trying to find time to add a couple of fairly simple features – comments, marking a colorsample as “I like” and maybe showing the current days picks in the picker screen so you can see how your pick works with the existing ones. And I have some clean up that is long over due – error handling, adding more to the login and profile pages and just general spring cleaning. Please bear with me, and if you have any input, advice or feature requests, either post a comment here or drop me an email at jp@hexday.com.

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