Trevor PaughSystems engineer
Trevor PaughProject Chronicles

Chronicles / Kongomax

Making the fakes real

Milestone

The mockups had a visitor counter, a web ring, a game leaderboard, and a projects list that were all placeholders. One day later each one was backed by something real: KV, a ring with next/prev/random, D1, and the actual projects.

The 88×31 badge, the traditional size for web ring and link-exchange buttons.
The 88×31 badge, the traditional size for web ring and link-exchange buttons.

Web 1.0 sites had features. The mockups had pictures of features. Day three made them work.

The visitor counter

The odometer-style counter in the Classic and GeoCities themes now reads from Cloudflare KV. One key, incremented on each page view, rendered as the familiar row of digits. It is approximate under heavy load, which is in keeping with the counters it imitates.

Kongo’s Friends web ring

The ring links are real. /ring/next, /ring/prev, and /ring/random read a member list and redirect to the appropriate neighbour, so another site can join by linking back. The 88×31 badge was drawn for members to use. The ring started with one member besides Kongomax itself.

The arena leaderboard

The Console theme has a small banana-catching game. Scores now post to a D1 table and the top entries show on the cabinet. Later work added an owner-set difficulty curve and moved the arena’s rendering to the compositor to stop a flicker.

The projects list

The five made-up projects in the mockups were replaced by the owner’s real ones, with links. This was the start of a “truthful copy” rule that later removed a “hand-coded” claim, invented counts, and a “Made with Notepad” badge.