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One rainy weekend a few weeks ago I wrote a really, really stupid WordPress extension, and I think it might finally be time to show it to the world (and open-source it, in case anybody wants a copy of their own).
But before I do that, I’d like you – yes, you – to help me test it out and check that it doesn’t break my blog too much! 🤞
The extension replaces the comments form’s <textarea>, on selected posts, with a <canvas> and some code1 to let you draw me a
picture instead of typing a comment. You’ll be assigned a random palette of colours2:
perhaps see if you can think of something to draw that makes use of the colours you have available?
Draw me something you can see. Draw me something abstract. Draw me something thoughtful. Draw me something scrappy. Just scrawl your thoughts in your own handwriting. Draw whatever you like3.
Naturally, the comments section below might be NSFW. That’s always true, I suppose, but perhaps doubly-so today.
Anyway: I hope that you’ll scroll down and draw me a picture. Everything should get piped through my usual moderation queue so if you’re not a regular commenter you might find that your drawing doesn’t appear rightaway.
I might copy some of the drawings below to my upcoming blog post publicly announcing the feature. If you don’t want me to do that with your drawing, put a note in the “Name” field – e.g. put “(private)” at the end of your name! – so I know not to.
Now! Scroll down and draw me something!4 🎨🖌️
Footnotes
1 Obviously this silliness requires JavaScript, but in the spirit of progressive enhancement you’ll still get a classic comment form if you don’t.
2 Don’t like the colours you’ve been assigned? Wait until somebody else comments, or 20 minutes, and it’ll change. You can’t just change it client-side though, you sneaky hacker: the colours are generated server-side and signed with a salted hash to prevent tampering!
3 I appreciate that when I try this out with a wider audience I’ll probably see a lot of penises. If you want to draw a penis, I suppose you can, but please don’t.
4 If you really want to send me some text, maybe turn off JavaScript for a few minutes, drop me a Webmention, or reach out by email, Fediverse, or whatever.
🌼 Beautiful, thank you!
Jetpack’s notification wasn’t remotely as pretty: 😅