I spent a day making a website easier for search engines to find, and finished it with a page that has almost nothing to do with search engines. It is a wall of nine panels. You click one, you leave a stamp, and the stamp is still yours the next time you come back. That is the whole thing.
I want to write about why the technical decisions in that page are the argument, not the decoration.
The constraint that made it work
The first version of this idea was worse. It was going to be a grid of embedded videos from people who make cheerful things, reposted on my site. I talked myself out of it in about ten minutes, for a reason that turned out to be the interesting one: embedding someone else’s video sends my visitor to their platform. It borrows nothing and gives away the only thing I have.
So the content had to come from the visitor. And the moment content comes from visitors, you are running a moderation problem, whether you meant to or not.
Why there is no text field
The obvious design is a text box. Leave a nice message. I did not build that, and the reason is not laziness.
Three characters is enough for a slur. Any free-text field on a public page, however small, is a commitment to moderate it forever, and I am one person who will not always be paying attention. A field I cannot supervise is a field I should not ship.
What I built instead is a stamp generated from a random seed stored in your browser. Shape, colour, inner glyph, rotation — all derived from that one number. You cannot type anything. You cannot be obscene with a hexagon. And the stamp is more personal than initials would have been, because it is yours and nobody chose it.
Identity without accounts
There is no sign-up. There is no name. The page does not know who you are and has no way to find out.
What it has is a number in your browser’s local storage. That number is enough to say “this mark is yours” and “welcome back” and nothing else. No email, no profile, no way for me to contact you or track you across the web. Clear your browser and you become a new person, which feels right.
The shared state runs on playhtml, which is CRDT-backed — two people stamping at the same moment both land, without a server I have to run or a database I have to secure. The less I store, the less there is to leak.
What this has to do with AI
I use AI heavily. Most of what I ship is built alongside it. And the thing I notice is that the tools are very good at producing more — more pages, more words, more features — and the discipline I keep having to apply is subtraction.
The wall could have had comments, likes, leaderboards, streaks, a login. Every one of those was available and cheap. Every one would have made it worse: more surface to moderate, more data to hold, more reasons to be on it out of obligation instead of pleasure.
Joy in software is not a feature you add. It is what is left when you stop adding things that create obligation.
Where the idea came from
The premise is not mine. It came from Amanda Gore and The Joy Project, whose work is about helping people reconnect with themselves and each other. Her version happens in rooms full of people. Mine is nine rectangles and some SVG.
But the mechanism is the same one she is pointing at: a person feels better when they are briefly, specifically seen. A generated stamp that is unmistakably yours, sitting next to strangers’ stamps on a wall that remembers you, is a very small version of being seen.
It will not get traffic. That is fine. It is the only page on my site with a reason to come back to it, and it took a day.
You can leave a stamp here.
There is a shorter version of this write-up on DEV, if you would rather read or comment there: I built a shared wall that can’t be spammed.