Is Northeastern Closed?

In 2015, Boston beat the previous historic 30 day record for snowfall—in 16 days. After classes had been cancelled thrice, and a fourth cancellation was imminent, I decided to do something about it. I made a silly website.

On a whim, I bought isnortheasternclosed.com, and in about half an hour, I threw together some basic CSS and HTML, put up a message that said "Not yet..." and posted it to my Facebook. I don't know how many people visited it on that first night because I didn't have Google Analytics up and running in time, but the next night, when Northeastern cancelled classes again, I got over 6,000 unique hits. (The night after that, when it was announced classes were back in session, I only got 200 hits.)

The website is very simple. It doesn't update automatically—when I get a text message alert from Northeastern, I go into my FTP server and swap out one HTML file with another page I've prepared ahead of time, like Rachael Ray.

Despite its lack of technical sophistication, I'm really proud of this project. I got really good at writing HTML quickly, learned a few things about how Facebook scrapes data from webpages when you share a link, got to delve into Google Analytics in a way I'd never had the data to before, and I made a thing that delighted a lot of people.