Next House Website

As the website chair for my glorious undergrad dorm (Next House), I redesigned the website during the summer of 2010. It featured a colorful, happy theme in celebration of Next’s upbeat culture, with homage to “Where the Sidewalk Ends” (a reference to Shel Silverstein’s poetry, lovingly adopted by Next house residents since the dorm is the furthest from campus). It also featured an interactive, easy-to-modify image collage that dynamically downloaded new images across the top of the page.

This was Next House’s official website from August 2010 - August 2017, when it was redesigned. Over the years, new webmasters made various additions to the site including a resident dashboard, links to calendars, and more.

The website was also the subject of a number of pranks over the years!

• In 2014, the entire page was rotated 180 degrees in the browser via some CSS trickery. At some point later in the day, a bit more CSS was added so that the page actually continuously spun around. When the prank was removed, the HTML body tag was accidentally deleted (nobody noticed for about a year thanks to forgiving web browsers!).

• In 2015, the entire page was mirrored.

• At some point, a wonderful script called antonio.js appeared. Upon typing a-n-t-o-n-i-o into the page, a special happy birthday message would appear.

You can still see a live, archived version of the website here as it stood in 2016! https://next.scripts.mit.edu/2016/