zach.ws

zach.ws (migrated to fun.zachbellay.com) is a copy-cat project of neal.fun. It is also a playground for me to try out new front end technologies and do a little creative expression via JavaScript.

Project 1: American Meat Consumption

Total Time Spent: 2 days

Technologies: HTML, CSS

At the time I was masochistically watching a lot of factory farming videos to understand how meat is produced in our current system. I wanted to visualize the carnage that we tolerate as a society, and was inspired by neal.fun/sell-sell-sell.

It's a very simple piece of HTML/CSS. Despite, or maybe because, of it's simplicity I got pretty good feedback. People liked it and were impacted by the piece.

I go into more detail about why I don't think the Scale of Wealth project did as well despite taking much longer and being much more technically advanced: Stories.

Project 2: The Scale of Wealth

Total Time Spent: 2 months

Technologies: HTML, CSS, jQuery, three.js, Vite.js

This project sort of tormented me for two months. I shot myself in the foot in a lot of ways, but persevered. I tried to understand quaternions, but I just couldn't. I was using 3D models generated in blender for the money cubes, but they were so bloated that loading the app required like 120 megabytes or something stupid, so I had to do something else. Eventually, I got it to where it is today, but honestly, this project kind of sucked the fun out of this stuff.

Hopefully I'll have another idea of some sort of data driven story I would like to tell. Usually though, these ideas come to me as preminitions at odd hours of the night. So I will have to wait until that happens again organically. I am also busy working on other things these days. If I have a simple idea that requires only HTML/CSS, and maybe a touch of jQuery will I work on that.

Update (Dec 19, 2023)

I let this domain expire and a domain squatter is now attempting to charge $950 for the domain, so I've migrated the project to fun.zachbellay.com.

The project is now hosted using Django on Railway. It required a bit of wrangling, and there were some hiccups along the way with Railway, but @Brody from Railway's Support Discord helped resolve all my problems!

Overall I am very happy with my experience on Railway and will start hosting all my side projects on there so I no longer have to worry about managing servers.

Here's the new github repo: https://github.com/zachbellay/fun3