Season 3, Issue 19: 👻🏃🏻🖨️🤮
1. Hooray for Yay.Boo
A few months back, I was tickled when Shawn asked me to dedicate some time to a very important project about one of life’s great questions. Building a silly website with no real purpose other than to make ourselves laugh took me back to the earliest days of my time building websites – when I would make something just to see if I could.
That kind of energy is what inspired us to build Yay.Boo. We wanted to make a place where there was very little friction between building something and seeing it alive on the interwebs. I’m really happy with how well we delivered on that mission. Watch how fast I published a very important website yesterday:
Our hope is that Yay.Boo might inspire you to build something weird and share it with us. It’s so easy! It’s so fun! There’s no pressure to be perfect or to build something that can make you millions — it’s hopefully a little like the weird web of the old days.
See you there? —PF
2. The Week That Was
Hi there, folks. Sorry that we didn’t send out a newsletter last week. Did you miss us? Some of our crew were out, and most of last week, it was just Barry and I:
(That’s a screenshot of Chicken, an experimental app built by James to address the problem of team presence. If you’re curious, let us know!)
What we’ve been doing lately:
Barry worked on a photo montage for Album Whale. Now, when you share a list on Twitter or Mastodon, there will be a pretty preview image made up of the four latest album art on the list. This turned out to be a much trickier problem than we expected!
Barry also brought a few refinements to Ponder, our little forum software.
Patrick continued on Yay.Boo which you just read about. Try it!
James bought a webcam to film the Good Enough printer. What for? You’ll find out soon!
Arun returned to the land of native app development this week, and I’m excited!
Shawn (that’s me!) labored over the next issue of A Good Enough Zine and is hoping to send it to the printer next week.
Take a look at these fun doodles we received on our printer! Thank you! Keep those drawings coming and tell your friends about it! ––SL
3. Side Effects May Be Vomit 🤮
Our youngest has decided to run cross country this fall. It’s kind of unfathomable to me as neither my wife nor I had any interest in running during our younger years. The first thirty-five years of our lives would find someone talking about running and us responding with “that sounds terrible.” (Still does to me.) From those genetics comes a girl who says one day “I like running.” Now that she’s into it I don’t know if she or we are sure if she actually likes running, though she is enjoying it as the team dynamic seems to be very good! (We’ve asked around. Apparently this is a consistent theme in many communities: “The cross country team is so nice!”)
Our daughter’s participation means we’ve attended a few cross country meets now. Not infrequently people will cross the finish line and rather immediately spew forth the contents of their lunch and other various bus snacks. This finds me further struggling to understand the sport. Perhaps this would be a good Yay.Boo site: A list of the contexts where vomiting is considered somehow good or positive. Certainly at times a good chunk-blow can be relieving, though I connect that feeling to illness or inebriation. Perhaps it’s good for your body to be pushed physically and mentally to the point that you have a physical release of your stomach’s contents? Or the upsides outpace the downsides? Convince me! —BH
4. Sharing is Caring
A clock where time is mentioned on YouTube, created by Russell Samora for The Pudding –SL
I don’t need another browser but Horse (a web browser) has the most excellent site. –SL
I ran into Gossip’s Web when reading People & Blog’s interview with Rachel J. Kwon. There is so much good stuff on the Internet! –BH
Don’t Go JSON Waterfalls (from Gossip’s Web, which is a dangerous website if you want to be productive!) –SL
Yesterday morning we were all looking at this live stream of a waterhole in Namibia, hoping to spot a giraffe (no luck, but there were plenty of Gemsboks). The site is an experiment using PartyKit, made by Matt Web, and the live stream is provided by Gondwana. –SL
EmojiGen is the ideal app to finally get that :capybara: emoji for your team’s Slack –BH
5. In Conclusion
So we have arrived at the end of our time together this week. I say our time, because this is no one-sided exchange. We have an assignment for you! If you have any love for the weird web, we’d greatly appreciate it if you put up a goofy site at Yay.Boo. We also need you to make us a drawing. Get creative and it’ll give us a smile. You’ll probably smile as you do it. Smiling is contagious! Yay! ––BH
