Put yourself on my site

My portfolio just went through another redesign, and this time I wanted something that was actually mine. Usually you take someone else's layout, add your own spin and call it a day. This one I drew from scratch. It's a 16-bit world, hills and clouds and all. If you find something that looks like it, that's a coincidence.

But the redesign isn't really what I want to tell you about. There's a thing hiding on the About section that most people scroll straight past.

You can put yourself on my site

It's called the Player Creator. You pick a pixel character, give it a name, and that's it, you're on the site. There's a row of characters on my portfolio and every single one of them belongs to somebody who visited.

Everything else is optional. A username gets made from your name if you can't be bothered (Renée Dubois becomes @renee_dubois on its own). You can add a bio, a few tags for what you work with, your age, what you do all day, where you're from. Or you can skip all of it and just be a name and a face. Plenty of people do, and the page is built to look fine that way.

No sign-up. Genuinely none

No email, no password, no "confirm your account" mail that lands in spam. You click save and you're done.

The way that works: your browser gets a key in a cookie, and my site only ever stores a scrambled version of it. So the cookie proves the character is yours, and I'm not sitting on anything that could unlock it. You also get a recovery key once, sixteen characters, for when you clear your cookies or switch to your phone. It's forgiving about the mistakes people actually make: lowercase, missing dashes, typing a letter O where there's a zero.

If you'd rather not keep track of a key at all, you can sign in with GitHub instead and your character follows you to any device. Linking X is on the way too.

You get your own page

Every character gets a link of its own, like /players/your-username. That's the part people seem to like. It's yours, you can send it to someone. If you've connected GitHub you can choose to show your handle on it, linking back to your profile. That one's a checkbox and it's off unless you turn it on. Your call, not mine.

One honest thing

Nothing goes public the moment you hit save. I read every character first.

There's a filter before me that catches the obvious stuff, and it's a suspicious little thing. It undoes the tricks people use to sneak words past, and it refuses links outright. But whatever survives that, I look at with my own eyes before anyone else sees it. It means your character might sit for a bit before it shows up in the row. I'd rather that than the alternative on a site with my name at the top of it.

Go on then

It takes about twenty seconds. Pick a face you like, type a name, and you're on the site with the rest of us. If you make something good I'll probably notice, I read all of them anyway.