About

So What is this thing?

Erm. Sort of like an arty-farty-random-stuff-generator-thing. To be honest I think your guess is as good as mine.

What does it do? How does it work

Each time you click the icon it grabs a random bit of arty stuff from the internet and displays it for you. There are a selection of websites I use and various algorithms for finding the things. It mainly does poetry, interesting photos, bits like that.

Why did you make it?

It all started when I began writing a virus of sorts for the university computer systems. It was a fairly simple thing. Once deployed, at random points in the day, it would download poetry off the internet and leave it on a random student's desktop and then, send it to a random printer in the block to be printed off. The occurance of download would steadily increase until the system administrators found it. Unfortunately I haven't gotten around to deploying it yet, but it's sitting on my laptop now, so maybe I will if I get a few spare moments.

Either way - this is essentially what it has evolved into, and maybe this can evolve a bit further, that or I'll research and write some kind of internet worm to bring poetry joy to everyone!

What is with the icons? Also, what does 'One cat just leads to another' mean?

The icons are just a thing I've collected over time. Some of them are things I like, some of them are things which mean something to me, some are random, others I simply liked the look of.

'One cat just leads to another' is a quote from Ernest Hemingway. I just liked the saying - but I thought it somewhat captured the just one more click nature of the website.

It's kinda slow...can't you speed it up

Sort of - yes. The smart way of running this website would be to make it so that the server just searched for pages all the time and made a massive database of all the poetry and stuff - then there would be almost no waiting time. At the moment it just finds things on demand.

Due to the nature of how it's coded and the small amount of traffic I get though - this is unlikely to change.

Erm I got some kinda bugged/blank/error page

Yeah it isn't perfect. It probably has an accuracy rate of about 95% which is pretty good when you think that it has to be able to grab information from several thousand different pages of the web. Sometimes when it doesn't find stuff it'll look again (without even telling you), but sometimes it will just fail. Not much I can do about that - it's about how they format their pages, not how I grab the information.