Okay, so I redesigned the site, but not much. I didn’t move anything around: actually, I just edited the CSS file and added a background. Maybe the design is more ugly now, but I think it is at least less boring, which matters more. I originally designed the site to look like—or blend in with—the comic, which it did, and which, it turns out, sucked. I really didn’t like how it wasn’t visually obvious where the comic image ended and where the layout images began. So now everything is super discrete.

I think the current look is inspired in part by the look of sites like Twitter, which are part of the current trend towards web design not trying to masquerade as print design and instead embracing the tiling and textures and boxes that were so common a decade ago (but which have been kept alive in MySpace profiles).

And I know I’m not alone when I say I’m actually pretty nostalgic about all those old Angelfire and Geocities pages. I never thought I’d go warm and fuzzy thinking about having to hit CTRL+A just so I could pick out the SimCity 2000 cheat codes from animated .gif backgrounds and spinning skulls and fire borders…

Speaking of fire and skulls, remember this? Oh man oh man oh man.

Anyway, I’ll be rotating the background. The current staticky violent fractal one was made in The GIMP—I just discovered that it comes with a bunch of sweet fractal generation plugins.

Okay! New comic tomorrow. (Actually, later today.)

Disclaimer: this whole post basically just sets up the one limerick in the world which requires a bunch of backstory. But hey, you’ll find out about an innovative way to keep growing online communities fresh and a huge limerick database in the process. So:

We begin with ROBOT9000: a while ago, Randall of XKCD saw that the active members in his IRC channel (#xkcd on irc.xkcd.com) had long surpassed Dunbar’s number and thus the channel had gone to suck: it was no longer coherent or cohesive, but had become a bunch of small conversations in a sea of static. So then Randall had a crazy revelation:

And then I had an idea — what if you were only allowed to say sentences that had never been said before, ever? A bot with access to the full channel logs could kick you out when you repeated something that had already been said. There would be no “all your base are belong to us”, no “lol”, no “asl”, no “there are no girls on the internet”. No “I know rite”, no “hi everyone”, no “morning sucks.” Just thoughtful, full sentences.

So he and his friend zigdon built ROBOT9000:

In zig’s implementation, the moderator bot mutes (-v) chatters for a period after every violation. The mute time starts at two seconds and quadruples with each subsequent violation, so you have five or six tries to get the hang of it. Your mute-time decays by half every six hours (we’re still tweaking the parameters). When looking for matches, the bot ignores punctuation, case, and nicks.

They implemented it in a new channel, #xkcd-signal, and it worked beautifully, so Randall announced it to the world and zig released the code to the public. News spread, and the code even wound up as the basis of a new 4chan channel, /r9k/. (I feel like this should make /r9k/ the anti-/b/, considering meme generation is /b/’s Prime Directive…)

Some time later, Randall decided that he wanted to create LimerickDB, a bash.org clone for limericks, spurring a limerick frenzy amongst fans of XKCD…

But: LimerickDB is not the first XKCD-related bash clone; that title would go to relsqui’s xkcdb.com, which collects quotes only from #xkcd and related channels (like #xkcd-signal). Not too long ago, relsqui threw editorial impartiality to the wind and recommended a recently submitted quote in the xkcdb, the aforementioned limerick-that-needs-explaining.

So, okay: Here’s that limerick.

Yeeeessss.

I love when my tools get better. This is a Good Thing. Of course, I’ll probably figure out a way to completely ruin the website while installing it, thanks to The Curse.