Reviving the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness

November 21st, 2012, 3 Comments »

1029 Internet years ago, in 2003, I started something called the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. It compiled “wacky, bizarre, surreal and otherwise strange examples of technical documentation”, collected from my own travels and through user submissions.

I think of the Hall as the first thing I ever created that the Internet liked. It was covered in Boing Boing, and images from the Hall appeared in the great British show, The IT Crowd.

As often happens with Web projects, I moved on to other distractions and a redesign of this site killed the wonky gallery software I was using to run the Hall. It’s been offline for three or four years now.

It occurred to me the other day that Pinterest would make a convenient and reliable new home for the hall. It seems like the natural environment for vaguely-amusing technical drawings and signs. And I found some free time to set up a board and start posting images.

Witness the revival of The Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness, 2012 edition.

“When boxing up your baby, ensure the lid securely fastened.” on Pinterest

I’ve got about 100 images to upload, so I’ll get the rest up over the coming days. New Hall submissions are always welcome.

UPDATE: Eight years later, Boing Boing wrote about the Hall again. Ah, the circle of geeky life.

UPDATE: I meant to credit the Wayback Machine, which managed to preserve my captions.

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Boring Site Note: Welcome, Ye Internet Hordes

March 24th, 2008, 8 Comments »

Thanks to the Digging of this page, a lot of traffic is heading to the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness (that link goes nowhere useful at the moment). So much so that it’s killing my webhost’s server. They don’t have flattering things to say about Gallery, the image hosting app I’m using.

So, apologies, but you can’t see the Hall at the moment. Come back tomorrow (it’s worth it, trust me), or even later today, and things should have returned to normal. In the meantime, you might want to check out the rest of my site, or check out a similar project on Flickr.

UPDATE: I turned off the .htaccess redirect, so the Hall is visible now.

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Little Widget Test and Boring Site Note

June 24th, 2007, 1 Comment »

I saw this over on Raincoaster’s blog, and wanted to give it a quick spin:

page counter

Handy for a blog, less handy for a site that’s a blog plus a bunch of static pages. Speaking of static pages, I wanted to mention that I’ve finally gotten the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness back up to complete capacity, after a long and tedious change-over to Gallery 2.0. There’s only three new exhibits, but you can see them at the beginning of the complete list of 105.

The Hall’s full of comment spam, but we’re in the midst of deleting all that and implementing a captcha.

1 Comment »