Every year, the Walker has a staff halloween party, which includes a departmental pumpkin carving contest. And this isn’t just a carve a grocery store pumpkin contest, it’s a creative, conceptual, re-imagine an artist or artwork pumpkin contest. Invariably, our carpentry shop and registration departments usually blow everyone else out of the water. Those of us that are a little less hands-on with the art work tend to be outclassed every year (exhibits 1, 2, and 3). New Media Initiatives never wins.

But not this year.

This year, we had a plan.

Actually, we came up with the plan after our no-show defeat last year, but we smartly held onto it for this year (thank you, iCal). On the day of the contest, we replaced every image of artwork on the Walker website with an image of a pumpkin.

And the rest of the pages (click to embiggen):

Calendar

Collections and Resources

Artists-in-Residence

Visual Arts

Design Blog

We ended up winning in the “Funniest Pumpkin” category.

Because we serve all of our media from a single server using lighttpd, and our files are all uniformly named, we were able to implement a simple rule set in lighty to replace the images. Instead of the requested file, each image was re-directed to a simple perl script that would grab a random jpg from our pool of pumpkin images, and send it’s contents instead. Part of the plan was that we would only serve these images to people visiting our site from inside our internal network. The rest of the world would see our website just as always. In our department, we all unplugged our ethernet cables and ran off of our firewall’d WiFi, which effectively put us outside the network, seeing nothing different on the site. We had a hard time holding back evil cackles as people came to us wondering how our site was hacked, and watching it slowly dawn on them that this was our pumpkin.

The images we used were all the creative commons licensed flickr images of pumpkins I could find. There were 54 of them. Here they are, for credit:

• Pumpkin
• My Geek-o-Lantern.
• Pumpkins!
• mini pumpkins
• My favorite season
• Tux Pumpkin!
• Thanksgiving, Orcas Island
• the last pumpkins
• candy pumpkins
• Jack O’Lanterns
• Dreams of Mellowcreme
• R.I.P. Punky
• Inside the Amber Pieces of Cloth Time
• Pumpkin Trio on Flickr
• Cannibal Pumpkin
• Pumpkin Avalanche
• Day 320 One of my favorites
• IMG_0589
• halloween bokeh
• Spooky
• pumpkin rows.jpg
• My front steps
• Halloween 2006
• Halloween 2005
• Fall
• pumpkin twins
• fructele toamnei
• Pumpkin Harvest
• small pie pumpkin
• Pumpkins – Space Invader
• You smiling at me
• after the storm
• You Must Be Daddy’s Little Pumpkin I Can Tell by the Way You Roll
• Mini citrouilles / Mini Pumpkins
• Jack
• Duaflex: Pumpkin Patch
• ‘WELCOME GREAT PUMPKIN’
• pumpkin lit
• Don’t overdo it this Halloween
• Smiler glow
• Hypnotised pumpkin
• sad pumpkins
• Red Eye
• winking pumpkin
• Black Cat Pumpkin
• Take me to your….tricks and treats!
• Which one?
• Pumpkins and Gourds Everywhere!
• smiley pumpkin
• Spongebob Pumpkin Pants
• Silk Garden Lite Socks
• i like how cute the tiny pumpkin is
• Happy Halloween From Sunny New Jersey!
• patch o’ pumpkins