organic html
I don’t know what determines the color and size of the flower (and whether or not there’s a little fly buzzing around), but it’s still fun. A site called Organic HTML has you enter your URL and watch a plant grow (before your very eyes) representing your web site.
Here’s mine.
Isn’t it beee-yuu-tiful?
(via 21st century paladin, presurfer)
Beautiful site.
BTW, what do they base these plants on? I got an all black one.
As I said in the entry, “I don’t know what determines the color and size of the flower.”
I also don’t know what causes the fly to appear, but USA Today‘s has two flies.
That’s pretty cool, but I wonder if it has anything to do with the website. I put in two sites on the same box and got two very different plants. One of those sites does get higher traffic and it had a bigger plant, but I’m not sure how the plant would know that. Maybe it’s magic.
Showoff. Your plant has lots of pretty colors.
It works by analyzing the html in the URL you give it. Any HTML color codes make the plant’s colors. Dan’s got a bunch of colors in his theme chooser, and you’ll notice that those are the colors in the plant. It apparently doesn’t read css, though. I haven’t figured out what triggers the other things yet, though.
Good observation. I wonder what makes the flies appear…
I’m also not sure what determines the size of the flower. I thought it was the size of the page, but yahoo.com’s flower is so huge it doesn’t even fit on the screen, and the HTML size isn’t that large. I then thought it might be the number of links on the page, but that doesn’t explain it either.
I’ve figured out a bit more.
The leaves around the bottom are links. The big dangling berries are forms. The stalk of the plant is from the tables. Changing the attributes on table elements makes it curve. The little leafy things are text. If you have a huge chunk of untagged text near the top level of your nesting, you can get a huge leafy thing. They get small if they’re a little bit of text or they’re deep in the nested tags. Colors seem to rotate through the colors named in any string that matches ‘color=#??????’ on your page.
Haven’t figured out the flies yet.
The best flower I’ve seen so far is ebay.com.
Figured it out. Flies come from ’embed’ tags, used to embed flash and java, etc.
Hey Levi,
Very intersted in learning how you found out which pieces of code created which elements of the plant? Were any graphic pulled from the site and analyzed?
I made guesses based upon examination of the flowers and the pages that produced them, and then I used a test site to explore my theories. I haven’t found any correlation between images and the flower, and my guess is that it’s strictly analysis of the html file you point it at that determines the attributes of the flower. It doesn’t seem to follow any links, examine images, etc.
funny when I went to try and see it it shut down. was it just a temporary thing?
My guess is it became so popular they exceeded their bandwidth limit for the month.
What about that root-like thing that comes out of the bottom. I didn’t have it a week ago and now I do. Weird.