Just over two years ago, when I was working at a small ISP in Louisville, KY I was really bored one afternoon. In a chat on IRC, a friend made note of my apparent inability to use resources like www.tinyurl.com when pasting links.

And so, freakinghugeurl.com was born. In a matter of an hour or two, I had registered the domain and built the site. It was pretty funny, and I got quite a few laughs. It was relatively heavily circulated, gaining around 10,000 hits.

Here we are two years later. People pretty much forgot about the site, traffic was essentially nonexistent.

Until yesterday..

Like a lot of geeks out there, checking my email is a morning ritual, like getting coffee. My inbox had about 5 emails from different people, all praising and cheering freakinghugeURL.com

“Oh shit.. Somebody must have linked it.”

Google searched the URL, sure enough, this Lifehacker post was the second link down.

Since I had only intended the site to be a joke among friends, there were a few performance-heavy bugs in the php that I didn’t bother addressing before. So, I had a look at things, and had my good friend Aaron at http://www.jetastudio.com/ ( a much more fierce code-warrior than myself) check it out to make sure it was all good. After a few minor changes, things were much more stable and safer. At this point, around noon or so, I was getting upwards of 6,000 hits per hour.

As of tonight, the emails are still coming in, although traffic has slowed a bit to around 2k visitors per hour.

There were a lot of really hilarious emails sent to me, and I appreciate every one of them. Thanks to all of you who took a moment to let me know you had fun with the site. I’m glad it made your April Fool’s day a little more ridiculous

-Jeremy

The other weekend I was playing way too much Advance Wars on my DS, so I decided to fiddle with creating a similar tile-based tactical game. After a couple hours that evening, I got this much done. I’ll probably never finish it, so here’s a video for posterity. Written in C++ and utilizing the allegro library.

Click here to view the video

I kind of put that guy on hold so I could work on something else. I had this idea for a kind of horror-movie style bathroom scene. Not sure where I’m going entirely, but the goal is a 30-40second piece with some kind of neat twist at the end.

Again, just a couple stills for now. Just getting the ball rolling here.

Here’s a little preview of a short animation I was working on this weekend. More stuff later, but a single frame for now

Finally getting some content on here. I just added the first version of an AfterEffects preset called jLensBlur. You can find it under the code section. Also, there’s an accompanying video in the Tutorials section. Check it out!