I once built a website because I wanted to tell stories.
That got slightly out of hand.
The website acquired a cockpit. Then statistics. Next it started recording where people came from, what they viewed and, recently, even whether they got lost.
I personally consider that last one an important statistic.
There are already enough websites that know exactly where you should go.
Mine does not.
Visitors can now also respond to stories.
No thumbs. No hearts. No stars. Just a name and something that apparently needed to be said.
Naturally, that had to be tested.
So I entered a name.
Jan.
And wrote:
Hilarious office story.
Send.
A moment later Jan appeared neatly in my cockpit, followed by three options:
Approve. Hide. Delete.
Good.
It worked.
Test passed.
And then Bram arrived.
Bram had read something somewhere on my website and left a response.
Well quacked!
Now look.
That was not in the test protocol.
Things happen on my website that I did not entirely account for in advance, but a duck capable of responding was not exactly on the technical roadmap.
My cockpit considered it perfectly normal.
There was Bram.
Well quacked!
With the same three buttons behind him:
Approve. Hide. Delete.
As if I make daily decisions about the freedom of speech of waterfowl.
I approved him.
Of course.
I am not going to censor a duck who takes the trouble to visit my website, read something and respond to it meaningfully.
There are limits.
But now we have a problem.
Because somewhere on this website, there is Bram.
I know where.
You do not.
Coincidentally, my website recently acquired another function.
It measures wandering.
Not how efficiently people travel from A to B, but how many steps they take once they enter somewhere and then think:
Hey, what is this?
The current record is 32 steps.
So let us do something with that.
Find Bram
Somewhere on this website, a duck has left a response.
His name is Bram.
That is all the information you get.
No link.
No button.
No directions.
And certainly no breadcrumb trail.
With a duck, that would be cheating anyway.
Find Bram.
And when you do, leave something yourself.
A thought.
A greeting.
A clue for the next searcher.
Or simply:
Quack.
Later, I will check the cockpit to see what happened.
Perhaps someone finds him in three steps.
Perhaps in twelve.
Perhaps somebody breaks the record of 32 and completely loses the thread along the way.
That is fine too.
Because perhaps that is the nicest thing about a website.
Not that you find what you were looking for.
But that along the way, you encounter something you did not know you were looking for.
We did not intervene.
Quacking is allowed. 🦆