Inspired by “new-tab” browser extensions such as Earth View from Google Earth and Momentum, the original concept was to display a new code sketch every time a new tab was opened. This idea grew to include a standalone site to showcase small, creative coding experiments.

You can find out more on this Medium post introducing the site.

In the days following the launch, codedoodl.es received an overwhelming response online - being featured on publications, news sites and blogs including Creative Applications Network, Fast.Co Design, The Next Web, It’s Nice That, Visuelle, Codrops and Siteinspire, as well as garnering hundreds of responses on social media and making the front page of reddit. All in all, the site received around 1.2 million page views in the first week.

I devised the original concept, which was then fully designed and developed with help from FLUUUID (and friends).

The project is community based - authors can submit doodles via a pull request, or by completing a form, and doodles that meet the necessary technical and creative criteria will be added to the site.

Huge thanks goes to the talented authors who have submitted their work to be featured so far - a full list of which can be seen on the site here.

Thanks also to Nexus Interactive Arts for sponsoring the project.

The site is a small Node.js (Express) app running on AWS elastic beanstalk with S3 / Cloudfront for static asset hosting and distribution. The frontend is a single-page app built on Backbone (more specifically, coffee-bone).

The app has been optimised to reduce hosting overhead, so the entire experience is comprised one request to the express app for initial markup, and one API request to the app for the doodle data, the rest of the site content is served directly via S3 / Cloudfront, meaning the site was able to scale to the front page of reddit on a single T2 micro instance.

The chrome extension is a modified version of the frontend app, using the node app API to receive the latest doodles.

The site and extension are completely open source and can be viewed on GitHub here and here respectively.

Press

• “Hypnotizing Doodles Show The Beautiful Side Of Coding”
• Fast.co Design
• “codedoodl.es is the online platform pushing coding and digital art closer together”
• It’s Nice That
• “This Chrome extension shows you amazing code demos on every new tab”
• The Next Web
• “New platform for showcasing experiments built with web technologies”
• CreativeApplications.Net
• “Interactive web doodles will mesmerize you”
• CreativeBloq