New Media kills in the Walker's pumpkin carving contest

By Justin Heideman

Back to Reader

Every year, the Walker has a staff halloween party, which includes a departmental pumpkin carving contest. And this isn’t just a carve a grocery store pumpkin contest, it’s a creative, conceptual, re-imagine an artist or artwork pumpkin contest. Invariably, our carpentry shop and registration departments usually blow everyone else out of the water. Those of us that are a little less hands-on with the art work tend to be outclassed every year (exhibits 1, 2, and 3). New Media Initiatives never wins.

But not this year.

This year, we had a plan.

Actually, we came up with the plan after our no-show defeat last year, but we smartly held onto it for this year (thank you, iCal). On the day of the contest, we replaced every image of artwork on the Walker website with an image of a pumpkin.

And the rest of the pages (click to embiggen):

Calendar

Collections and Resources

Artists-in-Residence

Visual Arts

Design Blog

We ended up winning in the “Funniest Pumpkin” category.

Because we serve all of our media from a single server using lighttpd, and our files are all uniformly named, we were able to implement a simple rule set in lighty to replace the images. Instead of the requested file, each image was re-directed to a simple perl script that would grab a random jpg from our pool of pumpkin images, and send it’s contents instead. Part of the plan was that we would only serve these images to people visiting our site from inside our internal network. The rest of the world would see our website just as always. In our department, we all unplugged our ethernet cables and ran off of our firewall’d WiFi, which effectively put us outside the network, seeing nothing different on the site. We had a hard time holding back evil cackles as people came to us wondering how our site was hacked, and watching it slowly dawn on them that this was our pumpkin.

The images we used were all the creative commons licensed flickr images of pumpkins I could find. There were 54 of them. Here they are, for credit: