Chris Armstrong

Well, it’s been a bizarre day.

For my latest uni project, we had to come up with a fake conference to be held in Belfast, brand it, and design promotional material for it. Inspired by Build, I created Tick Talk: A Web Conference About Time. So my tutors could access it easily to mark it, I hosted it in a random folder on my website.

Then, just around lunchtime today, somebody somehow came across it (presumably through Google, though what they would have been searching for I have no idea). Thinking it was real (and impressed by the unlikely line-up of speakers), they tweeted about it. Then somebody else tweeted about it. Then Andy Good (organiser of Build) tweeted about it, and the stuff hit the fan.

By the time somebody told me to check Twitter an hour or so later, a few hundred people had visited the site, 88 of whom had ’signed up’ (there may have been more if the form hadn’t kept crashing, thanks to some glitch with Typekit), and big-name designers who I follow were talking about my site… including Andy Budd, who was rightly miffed that some poxy web conference was advertising him as a speaker without even asking him. Thankfully when I explained the situation he took it in good humour, as did most of the people who were accidentally fooled, although there were one or two individuals who were less than amused (one guy had suffered Safari crashing on him three or four times when he tried to sign up, yet he persevered… only to discover that it was just a student project).

Despite the irony that a conference which was supposed to be about saving time on the web ended up wasting a LOT of people’s time, the outcome seems to be mostly good. Even when they found out it was fake, people were still talking about the design of it on Twitter (even Elliott Jay Stocks conceded tweeted that “Yes, http://chris-armstrong.com/ticktalk/ is rather nice.”).

The bizarre experience has highlighted a few things to me:

• Web standards work. I hadn’t intended anyone to come across the site, but because it was standards-compliant, Google could see it.
• All it takes for something to ‘go viral’ on the web is for the right person (in this case Andy) to tweet about it.
• People put a lot of faith in the appearance of websites, perhaps too much. Because it looked legit, people happily signed up and handed over their contact details (which I won’t be abusing, don’t worry). It’s just as well that internet scammers don’t tend to have great design skills!

So… I guess all’s well that ends well. Thanks to all those who have been complimenting the site and passing it on, and apologies to anyone who was accidentally duped by the site. If you signed up by mistake leave a comment and I’ll send you a link to unsubscribe from the mailing list.

Update 25/02/10

The TickTalk site has been featured on Styleboost! Seeing as it’s the main gallery site I visit, I’m pretty chuffed.

It’s a little big freaky just how much a website can know about you…

Don’t worry, all this info is generated dynamically by your browser, no-one can see it but you… and that creepy clown standing behind you.

Your IP address:
38.107.191.93

More detailed host address:
38.107.191.93

Display browser info:
CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)

Where you came from (if you clicked on a link to get here:

Language:
en-us,en;q=0.5

More to come as soon as I work it out. Thanks to this post.

Have been playing with the Google Maps API for a recent uni project, and have come across a pretty cool feature whereby you can get the user’s location (latitude and longitude).

Am still playing with it, but will post a tutorial once I get it sussed.

EDIT: May have spoken too soon… it doesn’t seem to work for everybody.

Another Flash piece from my AS Level Art project.

I still quite like this to be honest. I remember being fascinated by the fact that, because the clouds, ripples and windmills were all separate movie clips, moving at their own speed independent of one another, the scene would never be exactly the same twice. Stuff like that still fascinates me today when I’m working on dynamic animations.

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Came across this relic and a few others from the halcyon days of Lower 6th Art (2004/5).

I’d explain the concept but, really, it wouldn’t make any difference. This was long before I discovered the wisdom of NOT including music in websites, or had the ability to make a preloader to show you how long you have to wait for the 3.2Mb file to load… please have patience, there’s a slight chance you won’t regret it.

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