With all the attention the competition requires from me I didn't get a chance to fire a blog post about it. So in case you've been sleeping under a rock, there's this 1k javascript compo. I'm running it. You can find the website at
js1k.com.
To be fair, I feel a bit sorry right now. The idea sprung as a response from aneventapart's
10k compo. What seemed like a great idea at first, got watered down as details were made available. The two biggest issues I had with this compo was that a dozen libraries could be included for free (so it was ok to include a 60k library in your 10k demo) and that it was backed by Microsoft.
Now I have no problem with a contest being backed by MS, don't get me wrong. But the
terms of agreement stated that you are handing them
"a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide, sublicenseable and transferable right and license"
to do basically anything with your entry. Now that's just wrong. I always hate these terms on any compo. This just bites me even harder because I have a feeling they're going to use it to promote IE9. I mean, come on Microsoft, you can just hire people for that. The whole thing just smelled a little foul to me.
So after
jesting a little on twitter I just went ahead and
worked worked up a simple rules page with submission form. A contest was born.
Now, at first, things were normal. Some people picked it up, some traffic was generated, but all in all everything was within expectations. After the weekend I checked and was surprised the
js1k.com domain and
@js1k twitter accounts were still available. So I immediately claimed them, moving everything from the original subdomain on
qfox.nl to that domain.
In the first week, the site generated about 7.000 uniques. After that, I guess the site got listed at some blogs. I've seen
Ajaxian,
hackernews,
smashing magazine and a few other blogs.
After them the stream went up ten fold. And I went on a mini-vacation (just the weekend, I promise!). I guess Dreamhost crumbled under the pressure of 25k daily uniques visiting a naively coded website. To me 25k doesn't seem like a terrible high number. I mean, for me personally, it's a heckuvalot. Don't get me wrong there :p But for a website or web server, it should be no problem... I say naively coded website because I didn't bother to implement caching. It was quickly created to host the compo. Every page was querying the database, etc. It's a small database, and a small page, but still things add up and when I got home I noticed the sluggishness and 500's.
After mopping up the initial spill of 100 submissions over the weekend (wow) and catching up with a gazillion tweets I've added the cache. The site seems to behave properly now (but let me know if things go very wrong again). Of course the uniques are down so that helps too :p I wonder what the site would do with a true
slashdot effect. I think it'd just die.
So it's fair to say this thing got out further than I had imagined. It's a lot of work but I really like the demo's. There are so many awesome entries that I'm kind of happy I won't have to decide on which is the greatest :p And, mind you, this is just week two. Where will this end. How many demo's will there be come September?
As for #aea10k, I'm not worried. They are attracting a completely different crowd than #js1k is. My compo draws in simple small apps or graphical mathematical exhibitions. I suspect their compo draws in more serious, polished, full blown applications. But for what it's worth, I didn't mean to create this level of ruckus, guys.. :)
Ok. Let's see whether I can get hold of somebody at twitter now. It's not so strange @js1k got suspended for spamming, but it's a little weird it takes this much effort to undo that :(
Thanks for all the submissions guys!