Nutshotters.nl
Nutshotters.nl was a website I made for my group of friends. I had made a portfolio / blog website before during my very first module of Creative Technology, but that was just a small website, build using only bare HTML and CSS, with only a few pages (not more than 20). Nutshotters was different. This website was meant to be used by other people, rather than just teach me how to make websites. Although, admittedly, I did learn a lot of my Web Development skills from building this website. Since Nutshotters was a website I made for my group of friends. It mainly served as a means for inside jokes, but also as my personal online playground where I made little projects like the useless website generator and JoepTube. These projects are described on their own pages on this site. This page will focus on the core idea behind Nutshotters: A website for my group of friends.
Security
Naturally, since this site would contain dumb quotes and photos of us, it should not be accessible to everyone. Therefore, I indexed the site by Google and set it not to show up in the search results, meaning, you can (essentially) only access this site via the URL. Or perhaps via other search engines. But let's be real, who uses anything other than Google or Google-based? This is also useful, since any searches on Google on, for example, a name that's also mentioned on Nutshotters, will never return this site.
But since you can also access the site via the URL, additional security measures were required. So, I added a password to the site. To visit any page on Nutshotters, you had to have a cookie set with the correct values. In order to receive a password, you must complete a quiz with questions about our group. There were a total of 23 questions (I believe) and you could make one mistake maximum. After completing the quiz correctly, you received a password.
Features
Nutshotters had a lot of cool features. We had a nice landing page, a page with download links for the Android and Windows versions of the Nutshotters App, an 'about' section with a photo and short description of all our friends, a quote corner for stupid things people said, a gallery for photos, a calendar for upcoming events, and pages for valentine cards (inside joke: we all give each other valentine cards with dirty pick up lines every year. This page was like an archive of those) and aftermovies. There were more features on the website, but since those were larger projects or not really contributing to the purpose of this website, they are described elsewhere.
The quote corner is one of my favorite things on this website. The idea behind it was so simple: you can upload quotes to a database and view them here. The lay-out is such that they are presented as being very deep or smart quotes by relevant people, but really it's just stupid or out of context stuff my friends said. The presence of this quote corner also really affected the behavior of my friends. Every time somebody said something stupid, or a nice quote could be pulled completely out of context, somebody would yell "Quote!", and the quote was immortalized forever. One last reason why this feature specifically has a special place in my heart is that this was the first actual application of SQL I ever programmed.
The gallery was also a very nice feature on this website. It was just a bunch of stupid, silly photos of us. I used JavaScript to turn them into a slideshow. Looking at these photos brings back so many memories of fun nights we've had. The gallery also contains one easter egg: There is one specific image that you can click. Just one, in the 100-somewhat photos in the gallery. Clicking this image will link you to a page with a ton of epileptic gifs and a loud ear-rape song. Because why not?
I eventually quit Nutshotters because hosting became too expensive for the reward I got out of it. We didn’t really use the site all that much anymore and it mainly served as my online playground. A place where I could host my own silly projects. When I started working on this website, I had a new place to accommodate for these projects, and that was the end of Nutshotters. Nevertheless, I've learned a lot of my Web Development skills from this project and it also greatly boosted my passion for this field of expertise.