H8ball, the HTTP Status 8-ball

So, there’s this pointless little side project I did last week. It’s called h8ball, and it’s completely stupid. I’ll say it first so you don’t have to. Still, I figured I’d make a quick post about it, all the same, just so you’d know how something so random and stupid came to be.

We have a really fun group of geeks at Mission Data, and occasionally we get into silly discussions that only a geek could find amusing. One such discussion happened when Stasia commented that she was tired of seeing 500 error status codes from a web application she was testing out. Steven responded that she had better learn to respect the status codes, or he’d hit her with a 403 (forbidden) error, instead.

It was then that I pulled up WIkipedia’s list of HTTP status codes and started reading through them. Taken out of context, some of them could be downright amusing, and I commented that many of them sounded like the kinds of answers you get from a Magic 8-ball. That got some chuckles, so I spent 10 minutes hacking a quick app together that would return a random status code.

Then it got out of hand. That night I started working on twitter OAuth integration, the next night, some basic layout, and the next, comments. Anyway, the completely useless end result is at http://h8ball.com for your mild amusement. At least I can say I got to play a bit with Twitter integration, which I’d been putting off until now.