Waxy.org
Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, a journalist/programmer living in Portland, Oregon. I'm the CTO of Kickstarter, created Upcoming.org, and some other stuff too.

Contact Me: log@waxy.org or waxpancake on AIM

ZombieURL

Posted Apr 18, 2008 (Updated Aug 10, 2009)

For the last few weeks, I've been spending every Friday with a small group of brilliant geeks — Rael Dornfest, Asha Dornfest, Chris Anderson, Greg Borenstein, and Adam Greene — for a weekly one-day hackathon. We call it Bottlecap Labs, a place to bounce around ideas, support each other's work, and occasionally whip up a project.

The first is ZombieURL, a TinyURL-clone with a twist.

Put in a URL, send it to a friend, and enjoy. Keep a camera nearby to capture the fun. (Here's a Zombie-fied version of Waxy, for example.)

(Warning: We're not responsible for emotional scarring, concussions, or heart failure as a result of using ZombieURL.)

17 Comments (Add Yours)

Apr 18, 2008
9:40 PM  
Lilly wrote:

Not as bad as a Rickroll by farrrrr. :)


Apr 19, 2008
3:16 AM  
Infested! wrote:

omg, my heart..

this is evil ^^


Apr 19, 2008
7:05 AM  
Hank wrote:

Ha, nice!

This is kinda like this service - http://tinyurl.com/5rnkto


Apr 19, 2008
11:28 AM  
Anonymous wrote:

Ah, sadly not iPhone compatible. Still, this really brings up a lot of ideas for non-prankish tinyurl value-additions, for lack of a better term.


Apr 19, 2008
5:42 PM  
Philipp Lenssen wrote:

I prefer this to TinyURL actually.

Are you overlaying something on a page wide iframe? What else could be done with this technique?


Apr 19, 2008
6:46 PM  
Andy Baio wrote:

Yep, that's pretty much it. JQuery for the effects, SoundManager for the audio. The source tells it all.

Not sure what else you could do with it... Create a soundtrack for a website that doesn't have one? Mash together two sites? GoatseURL?


Apr 19, 2008
6:51 PM  
Yaanu wrote:

Fucking brilliant.


Apr 19, 2008
7:32 PM  
range wrote:

Pretty cool. I was surprised. I expected the page to have another layout, some graphics and such.


Apr 20, 2008
12:38 AM  
Superdotman wrote:

I'm running Safari 3.1 (5525.13) on OS X 10.5.2, and the sound didn't play the first time I tried the link. All subsequent sounds played, but sometimes a moment after the image appears.
Awesome idea and execution, though!

A word of advice to pranksters: Try to URL-shrink text-only pages, rather than pages with sound (or sound and video).


Apr 20, 2008
5:00 PM  
Matt wrote:

hey, that was pretty awesome. My 4 month old daughter sleeping nearby thought differently, but she'll learn...


Apr 20, 2008
5:40 PM  
Rex Hammock wrote:

This is definitely 'fundable' -- and in your SXSW session. Thanks for the laugh.


Apr 22, 2008
9:13 AM  
Fubiz wrote:

Excellent link!


Apr 22, 2008
1:16 PM  
Jish wrote:

Baaaassssttttaaaarrrrddddd!!!!!!!


Apr 24, 2008
7:14 AM  
Charles Alves wrote:

Pretty cool!


Apr 24, 2008
1:38 PM  
Mr. Grass wrote:

LOL - this is awesome.

I've had a live webcam of my (uhhh) front yard for a couple of years - a surprising number of people surf on by to see the (uhhh) excitement.

Since I'm doing the first lawn mowing of the season this Saturday ... I just added a link to the Zombie'fied version on the main page for those coming by for live coverage of this (uhhh) entertaining activity.

P.S. Tidy says a couple of warnings with your web code/frame wrapper - maybe move the CSS code into the head section (?)


May 3, 2008
7:20 AM  
alesh wrote:

Wow cool.

However, something about the NYTimes defeats it. Try putting in this link.


May 3, 2008
9:45 AM  
Andy Baio wrote:

Yeah, we noticed that early on. The New York Times uses Javascript to break out of any frame. We figured if they were that concerned about people framing their content, we shouldn't try to find a workaround.


 

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Waxy Links
Ads via The Deck
November 20, 2009
Regretsy gets a book deal — the anonymous author turned out to be April Winchell, collector of audio oddities
Google Chrome OS Demo — a world without a local filesystem and apps; also, the Chrome UI concept video (via)
Patrick Moberg's Internet Vices — funny, Tumblr feels more like beer than wine to me
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck's "Heaven Can Wait" — Keith Schofield's surreal video and insane treatment were inspired by FFFFOUND and Reddit, but maybe too explicitly (via)
November 19, 2009
YouTube adds machine-translated automatic captions — starting with some partner channels, but auto-timing is available to everyone today
Microsoft tries to patent Edward Tufte's sparklines — they were recently added to Excel
Leonard Lin's Retweet Avatars for Greasemonkey — a subtle change, but a big improvement
Web-ops god John Allspaw leaves Flickr to join Etsy — he's the last of the original Ludicorp team to go (via)
November 18, 2009
Laptop Steering Wheel Desk — don't miss the product photos
Interview with Ralph Eggleston, Pixar's production designer on WALL-E — from last February, but new to me; I didn't know the Axiom had three passenger classes
NSFW: Animated pixel-art video for Flair's "Trucker's Delight" — warning: very offensive and sexist, but the attention to 16-bit detail by director Jérémie Perin is incredible
NY Observer on Anil Dash's new government 2.0 incubator project — Expert Labs debuted at Web 2.0 today, funded with a $500k grant from the MacArthur Foundation
November 17, 2009
Google's Dan Morrill explains how the Droid autofocus breaks every 24.5 days — this gets second-place for quirkiest Android bug (via)
Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter on Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns — his style of comedy usually makes me uncomfortable, but this made me laugh
The Pirate Bay shuts down their tracker for good — they're switching to DHT instead
November 16, 2009
How Darren at Link Machine Go found Belle de Jour's identity five years ago — Brooke was part of the early UK blog scene
ICU64, real-time visualization of Commodore 64 memory — the developer also posted videos of Paradroid and Boulder Dash (via)
Russell Davies on pretending and "barely games" — his SAP prototype looks like great ambient fun (via)
NYT Magazine on the indie gaming movement — nothing new here, but good overview with a wonderful closing anecdote from Cactus
Tim O'Reilly on the pending War for the Web — "more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform"
November 14, 2009
Jason Scott rounds up Geocities' top 10 most popular MIDI files — along with a torrent with 51,000 MIDIs rescued by Archive Team
Matt Haughey on the discovery of his brain tumor, treatment, and the Internet's response — there were about 1,000 #mathowielove tweets in 24 hours
Belle de Jour reveals herself after six year of anonymity — only six people in the world knew, she only told her parents yesterday (via)
Paul F. Tompkins debates comedy ethics with Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd — great discussion, and it's hard not to see where both are coming from (via)
November 13, 2009
Rogue Amoeba stops iPhone app development after App Store idiocy — I'm with Marco, the only fix is allowing external apps, but it's unlikely (via)
Numb3rs on IRC — "Luckily, I speak l33t."
Prank War 8: The Skydiving Prank — hard to say if life-threatening situations are funnier than public humiliation
301 Works, Internet Archive works to preserve URL shortener data — the shorteners will provide regular backups and hand over data on closure, though TinyURL's conspicuously missing
November 12, 2009
Quizipedia — simple game with trivia scraped from Wikipedia entries
Kill Screen, funding a new art magazine about videogames — sounds like the English analogue of Amusement I was hoping for

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