Looking Back at “Desktop Madness”

It’s the 10th anniversary of the registration of the StarKeith.net domain today, so I’m doing a little bit of looking back over the history of the site.

One of the longest running themes here has been my Desktop Madness series, where I post interesting wallpapers that I usually find around the Internet. This “series” didn’t start right away – in fact, the first post only dates back to November 30th, 2004 – but it’s still the longest running recurring “themes” on my site.

Desktop Madness started as just an amusing title for a post with a picture of my computer’s desktop – icons and all.

My, how times have changed.

Not long after that, I stopped posting pictures of my desktop, and instead just posted the actual background picture itself instead.

The Desktop Madness section of my site has consistently been one of the most-visited sections of my site, in terms of raw views – after all, lots of people search Google (or whatever) looking for desktop backgrounds/wallpapers.

I have a neat utility – John’s Background Switcher (I highly recommend it) – which randomly switches my background wallpaper every 15 minutes from my very large library of pictures, and I’m always finding more pictures online. At the time of this post, there are 1,303 individual pictures in my collection, which I could theoretically cycle through in just over 13 days. (Amazingly, this only takes up a measly 709 MB of space on my hard drive – most of my pictures are highly compressed PNG files.)

Of course, one downside to a popular wallpaper series like this is that people tend to download the files quite a bit. I have a great hosting provider, but I only have so much bandwidth to spare, which is why I don’t necessarily post updates as frequently as I used to. While I’d love to be able to share all these files, it’s just not economically feasible for me to host every single one of them online for anyone to download (and thus, suck up all my bandwidth).

Still, I love finding new and interesting wallpapers, and I will continue to do so – maybe not as often as I used to, but I don’t think I’m going to stop any time soon.

By Keith Survell

Geek, professional programmer, amateur photographer, crazy rabbit guy, only slightly obsessed with cute things.