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 !

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.

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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.

#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

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://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/dailywxmap/

July 3rd Map:

July 7th

January 1sts Map:

As often as I can I’ll be run this map through the sampler and I’ll update the spectrum’s here to see how they progress.

This was an accuweather one from the other day, unfortunately they update the same image location so I can’t get daily updates as I limited 1 image to 1 sample (for now anyway).

I’ll add some more as I come across them.

1: I’ve often thought I want my hex to be based on this picture and then I have to guess what the colors are, or pick an actual color rather than just the general colors of the picture. It would be nice to have some sort of bookmarklet that I could use on any page, that would popup a hexday page with the image I choose sampled and ready for color picking.

2: I have for a while wanted some sort of automated system or parsing and logging colors. Sounds crazy I know. But my idea is you could add your flickr rss feed in your profile and sporadically hexday will collect all your new images, sample them down to the most common colors and log them for you. Not as actual choices, but logged in a way that you can still pick from them, and you can still see the patterns and color trends your pictures have. Now apply that to other possible feeds and you can probably see where I’m thinking this could go.

Well after much tweaking this evening I have a test implementation that is 80% of the way there. Now I just need to bolt it onto hexday and get it alpha tested by some of the regulars who leap at the chance to try something new that will probably break.

Here are a couple of the example outputs.

I’m leaning towards two versions of the UI, one like the ones attached that show the colors in relation to the actual space they hold in the picture, and one in the true spirit of hexday will be the vertical strips since really it’s all about the colors.