ballfart.com started as a parked domain (yuck, i know.). i was with some friends late at night in ~2021, and we were perusing namemc for minecraft usernames and we happened to come across "ballfart". our odds at getting that at the right time were low, but our previous funny vanity domains "assclownshit.ninja" and "msnbclive.app" were set to expire soon, so i ended up purchasing ballfart.com. at its inception it was a just a silly domain that we could hand off to friends to join our private game servers.
and then came along the green mink.
i don't want to demystify the "grink" too much, so i will be a bit vague about its birthing into our world. a friend of mine, dashel, foisted the grink upon me on a dreary eve without fanfare in mid-2023. it was placed into our chat, and served as an unofficial mascot of sorts. it was a frequent topic of discussion for our group.
then, around halloween 2023, i watched a few youtube videos talking about the old web, geocities, etc.. and felt inspired to make a mark of my own on the internet. i hastily cloned some javascript from a github repo, rewrote it to the best of my ability to (almost kinda) suit my purposes, and shipped the first version of ballfart.com. it was clunky, and all it had was a very stuttery image of the grink bouncing rapidly across the screen with the now trademark off-center welcome message, "welcome to ballfart.com".
it was an instant hit in my circles. however, due to its name, and seemingly everyone's horrible past experiences with shock sites, it took some convincing to get people to check out my page. fair. the site stayed mostly unchanged for a few months, and then i decided to really start to get ballfart.com out there. i left it in comments, tagged it on wplace, and even had friends feature it in some youtube videos.
in early 2024, the site started to get a lot of traffic, so i decided to ship a few updates, most notably the now iconic title_track.mp3 (spanish flea). as far as site music goes, there were a few losers along the way that just really did not fit the site, including playonline - dolphin, and the back half of dueling banjos. the site stayed static for a while after that, i had exhausted my knowledge of web design.
i spent some time away from ballfart.com to focus on private and for-hire projects. that experience really expanded my knowledge of web design. big shout-out to w3schools!
in the back half of 2025, i bought a receipt printer off facebook marketplace. my original idea for it was to have a private site where friends and family could send me little messages and photos at my desk. i did it, it was fun, but the bit got old after a while. i tried using it as a task board / reminder collector in lieu of sticky notes, this sort of worked, but i just went back to using my whiteboard. some time later i saw a video online of a guy who had a receipt printer exposed to the internet, and i thought that was awesome. i took some time to setup some basic filtering, and input sanitation and tossed a big flashing banner message at the bottom of the site.
about a week after it went live i started getting messages in the order of hundreds every day. i had to move the receipt printer from my network rack to my office so i could better isolate the sound. it was constantly running for there for a while. this led to the creation of the fridge, and then eventually a donors page, the sidebar, a redux of the green mink animation (now at your native refresh rate!), mobile compatibility, and a ton of all around polish.
that about brings us to today. ballfart.com now exists as my sandbox for testing new designs, element types, and really pushing the limits of what i can design. all while being a direct connection to internet users from all around the world. this project has been a ton of fun thus far, and like all good projects, i don't think it will ever be done.
regards,
dink
i lieu of a comments section, i decided to open an email address on this domain, if you have thoughts about a post, please reach out! here's a mailto: link with a prefilled subject: dink@dink.casa