Erik Rothoff Andersson has written a fun little Asteroids-style JavaScript bookmarklet called “Kick ass”.
When you click the bookmarklet a white, triangular Asteroids-style spaceship appears on your screen, over which you have complete control. Using the arrow keys to navigate and the space bar to fire you can fly around any web page vaporizing the Web page contents.
… and now for the science bit
When you run the bookmarklet the JavaScript code iterates through the DOM adding a class of “ASTEROIDSYEAHENEMY” to each element, which is then styled to “display: none” when it detects that the bullet-thing, yeah, that fires from your white triangle intergalactic spaceship has hit it.
Or something.
High scores
So this evening (Sunday 19 December) I pitted the homepages of the Scottish universities against one another.
| # | Instiution | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | University of the Highlands and Islands | 1690 |
| 2 | Abertay | 1550 |
| 3 | St Andrews | 1400 |
| 4 | Scottish Agricultural College | 1390 |
| 5 | Aberdeen | 1230 |
| 6 | Edinburgh | 1200 |
| 7 | Glasgow | 1130 |
| 8 | Glagow Caledonian | 1110 |
| 9 | Queen Margaret University | 1070 |
| 10 | Strathclyde | 980 |
| 11 | Dundee | 960 |
| 12 | UWS | 890 |
| 13 | Stirling | 870 |
| 14 | Robert Gordon University | 790 |
| 15 | Heriot-Watt University | 760 |
| 16 | Napier University | 690 |
| 17 | Edinburgh College of Art | 460 |
| 18 | Glasgow College of Art | 190 |
| 19 | Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama | Did not finish |
The four ancient universities did well to make it into the top 10. Not that I’m implying that their homepage designs were influenced at all by how well they score on Homepage Asteroids.
Although, of course, they should!
Gareth @ St Andrews
University of York got 730 points and a lot of shouts of “Die elements of the home page, die!”. Nice work
Good work! Maybe we should start some kind of national league.