Lessons learned:

• If I use strict and warnings, I should keep an eye on the Apache error log. I generated 10GB of errors in the first 24 hours, filling up /var on my webhost, which resulted in 8 hours of downtime during the Slashfilm surge.
• Google Adsense now allows “personal” domains. I tried to sign up in 2004, when Weboggle was all the rage, and I was turned down because it lived under plutor.org. I’m not sure when the policy changed, but I applied this week and was approved on Thursday.
• Google ads don’t really make you much money. At this point, the ads on the Film Addict page have made me $2.90, but even if I had had them from day one, I’d only have made about $15.
• I sleep fine at night, even after creating something clearly intended to be meme-fodder.
• With enough data, you can get awesome bell curves. Histogram of number of movies seen:
  

It didn’t end up going much of anywhere on Digg or Reddit or Delicious. I’m not sure why, but I think part of it might have been the individual nature of the form. You could compare your list against your friends’, but there was no community interest. Another factor (especially on Delicious) was the unique id in every posted URL; there could never be enough posts of a single URL to get any momentum.

I posted it to MetaFilter Projects. Pretty much immediately, Mathowie Twittered it. At this point, more than 200 people have taken it already. Give it a try, compare your list to mine.

After a rough (and late) start in Boston, things went well. Philly took some naughty shots early, which got people riled up here and for a period of time, things were pretty lewd. Eventually it became family-safe fun time party photos and some gentle photo-jabs were traded between the sister parties. Sometime around midnight, Chris texted me “this is the best thing we’ve ever done.” I agree. That said, we learned things. The script had all kinds of bugs (mostly because I wrote it without having the camera we were going to use or the software). The CGI was too weighted towards new photos. And whereas Chris had done this before and had a neat photobooth setup (a side room, tripod, IR trigger), Boston had a camera that had to be hand-shot and plugged back into the laptop every few minutes.

Will we ever be able to learn from the mistakes we made, and try out a new iteration of the script? I certainly hope so. Maybe we can hook in a third city. California friends, I’m gesturing in your direction.

Download FeedWordPress Collapse Filter 1.0

Update 5 Apr – Fine, sheesh! I didn’t realize people actually still used it. Gometric is now renewed for another two years, and I have some ideas for some updates and whatnot.

Nomad has been ignoring work with it all day.

(I had to flag one of my own comments approximately thirty times while I was testing it. I wonder what Mathowie thought about that.)

So now it uses the HTML pages to get the list of photos instead. I don’t know if that’s harder on Flickr’s servers (it’s certainly less elegant), but since it caches them, it’s only really two more hits per Flickring session.

Update 14 Dec – Fixed to work with Greasemonkey 0.6.4

Motivation

Around the the end of January, I was doing some reading for work on the Document Object Model (DOM). The DOM (ideally) allows JavaScript to access and modify any element in an HTML document in a heirarchical Object-Oriented fashion (well, as OO as Javascript can ever be). The more I read about what was possible, the more I realized that I could create a totally interactive application written in merely HTML and JavaScript.

Then I remembered what I think is the most useful JavaScript feature in existance: asyncronous HTTP requests using the XMLHTTP object for Internet Explorer or the XMLHttpRequest object in Mozilla-based browsers. Using this object and a little server-side scripting, I could not only keep important logic and large files like dictionaries on the server, but I could also create multiplayer (potentially massively multiplayer) interactive online games that required nothing but a modern browser.

Think about PopCap, Pogo, Yahoo Games, and MSN Games. Every single one of the games on these sites could be done without requiring a single plugin. I thought about it, and I decided to set about demonstrating it. (It was only after this game was mostly completed that I noticed SSCrabble. While it uses similar client-side scripting techniques, it lacks the multiplayer functionality entirely, which is too bad.)

Technology

WEBoggle is primarily HTML and JavaScript. There’s fewer than 100 server-side lines of Perl, and a 90,000 word dictionary.

All WEBoggle requires is either Internet Explorer 5 or newer, or a Mozilla-based browser like Mozilla, Firebird or Galeon. (Internet Explorer 4 should work, but I’ve never tried it.). There are a few caveats, and good reasons why other common browsers like Opera do not work, but those are all listed in the Bugs section below. Also, your browser must accept cookies. Sorry.

Cheating

Cheating in an online game is an inherent problem. I’ve worked as hard as I could in order to keep important scoring logic server-side in WEBoggle. I’m only human, and it’s possible that I’ve missed something and it’s possible to modify the JavaScript source code so that it submits invalid words and they get erroneously scored.

A much easier way to cheat, however, is to write a script to give you all of the words that can be found on the board. I could have made it more difficult to do this, but as long as the letters are legible to the player, you could simply type them into a command line script that would then give you a list of words to type back into the game. There was simply no way to prevent this. (I wrote such a script in about 60 seconds, so if you’re considering it, your effort won’t make you “the first”. I was able to get more than 50 points consistantly.)

I just hope that everyone who plays this game remembers that cheating is no fun, not for you, and not for anyone with whom you’re playing..

Updates

Once WEBoggle started generating several thousand player-games per day, it started interfering with the operation of the sites on my webhost. I took it down until I could make it more efficient, and a guy named Evan Simpson came forward with an offer to mirror it for the time being.

As anyone who’s seen my Projects listing will agree, I have a short attention span. Updating WEBoggle kind of fell off my radar, and I told Evan that he was in charge. He’s done far more than I ever planned or expected: “missing words” submissions, two simultaneous games (one of which is Big Boggle), the ability to rotate the board, and a list of “words that nobody found” with each round.

Sightings

• 2004-02-18: MetaFilter
• 2004-08-13: MetaFilter
• 2004-08-*: Delicious
• 2004-08-17: Waxy links

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank everyone who helped me test WEBoggle and suggested stupid improvements: BrainiACK, Nomad, Splatta, Kazy, and especially M. Also, all the people who donated money through Paypal and posted links to WEBoggle on their blogs. At its height, more than 6000 person-games were being played every day. And a thousand thanks to Evan Simpson for mirroring and then improving the game.