🇫🇷 Bienvenus, Blinkies neuf!
Ladies, gentlemen and all who are neither and in-between, we are happy to present something I've never-before seen discussed or shared in the modern day:
achachichou | Complètement Blinkies
Le Coin de Sylvie | Pataseletcompagnie
There was an entire scene of this stuff! We managed to find over 7,500 blinkies from 15 websites just from a few days of deep-diving - and who knows how much more we'll find!
And not only that, but we discovered an artist that has the largest collection of original blinkies we've ever found from this era: Complètement Blinkies at a whopping 3,483, far outpacing our previous record-holder Whiskeyann at 2,121!
All of these blinkies have been made available on BlinkieWiki to explore to your heart's content. The metadata has largely not been filled yet for this many graphics. That's where we're opening it up to you, to help us transcribe them! Anyone can contribute to metadata by clicking on a graphic and then on the button in the top right corner that says "Submit metadata for this graphic".
Of course, all of these websites being in French, we needed some help with navigating them. For that I thank my good friend Thomas for being kind enough to go through these websites with us and translate their usage terms so that we can accurately record them on the website!
These look a little different!
More interestingly, these graphics aren't just "blinkies with french text". In fact, these blinkies had their own culture of sorts that was unique to them! They developed design patterns and use cases that differed slightly from the English-speaking primarily-USAmerican sphere, such as:
people commonly putting signatures in their graphics
the ample usage of border-breaking graphics and unusual shapes
an emphasis on their purpose being for e-mails and forums more than personal websites
Chez Nous | Chez Petite Fleur | Complètement Blinkies
This could potentially explain why they haven't circulated very far outside of their bubble, in addition to the language barrier. But they share many similarities with other blinkies as well; dollz were just as much of a thing here!
How was this found, anyway?
Bob is to thank for finding the artist that started this rabbit hole, Kiss Design. This artist's work has proliferated a fair amount beyond the French scene thanks to their numerous stylish blinkie templates that made their way into some sites like MyBlinkie. Bob was also responsible for finding this connection since Kiss Design does not appear to be credited on this website; this stood out as quite peculiar to us.
🌠: I'm gonna be continuing to search for more non-English blinkies, and I highly highly encourage others to submit them if they find or make 'em!
Previously we merely scraped some two hundred or so templates from Kiss Design, and that was that. But recently while I've returned to my craze of developing this website, I realized a fatal flaw in my scraping method for gathering graphics, which honestly deserves its own post elaborating on that. In short, I figured out a more reliable way of extracting all graphic URLs saved by the Wayback Machine under a specific domain, and felt like testing this on some websites that previously had very large-seeming collections that we did not get much out of with my previous method. We then promptly discovered...
We missed... a lot of graphics from Kiss Design. A lot.
We've since uncovered over 2,000. And that's just BLINKIES. Guys this website is HUGE.
And this quickly led to a rabbit hole of exploring the website more deeply, as well as those linked to by Kiss Design. And the rest is history!
Holy shit this is the most exciting and fascinating thing we've found so far while working on BlinkieWiki. I never would've guessed we'd stumble on such a gold mine! And one that no one really... seems to talk about??? O_O
I REALLY hope we get to find more pockets of blinkies like this in different languages from the same era!! We don't know yet if they're out there, but it's highly likely. We'll be on the lookout for more - so stay tuned!
