Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-10-12. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.
Original post
After all, why shouldn’t we have a fully animated footer with day and night cycles?
I know it’s a little unusual to write an entire article about the footer of a website. But I’ve been rebuilding mine, and now it has boats, an airplane flying over a lighthouse, a robot fishing, and a full day and night cycle. The whole thing has the feel of an oil painting.
Over time, I’ve noticed my website becoming more interactive. There are animations, videos, audio, and all these different experiments you can play with. I’ve been trying to make sense of what happens when a website starts to feel like a place. This footer gives me something concrete to work with.
The screenshots below show it at different sizes and at different points in the simulated day, from night through dawn and so on. There’s even a moon that comes up if you want to sit and watch it. The cycle takes roughly five minutes, so you can leave it running in the background and occasionally glance over to see how the light has changed.
It’s a small thing, but it changes the feeling of the site. All these projects have their own little worlds, and this starts to make them feel like they belong somewhere together.
That has me thinking about what else I could do in this style. Maybe I’ll take a crack at the navigation next, or redesign a few other pages. I don’t quite know where that goes yet, but the feeling is interesting enough to keep exploring.
There’s already something of a massive grimoire about the website. It’s full of ideas, projects, and capabilities you can poke around in. You can explore them yourself, or send your AI agent in to see what it finds. I’ve noticed that borrowing a feature or technique from one of these experiments can improve another project surprisingly quickly.
I want to figure out how moving through all of that could feel like exploring a place.
I’ve been building all these virtual world experiments, including some much larger ones I haven’t shared online yet. Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that the website itself could become its own kind of virtual world. How would that work? What would navigation through it look like?
I don’t know. But watching this footer come together, I can see something starting to emerge.
One thing I do think the site needs is some direct connection to the real world. Some kind of grounding anchor beyond me having another crazy idea while walking down the street.
Maybe that involves sensors feeding telemetry into the site. Something happening out in the world that the website can respond to. I haven’t figured out what that should be, but the possibility is naturally interesting to me.
I’ll keep working on that question. For now, the footer is a fun little experiment, and it’s fantastic what you can do with the right concepts these days.
See it live: https://www.ericrhea.com/ and scroll all the way down :)
Connected work
- Horizon: See the living painting and its replayable easel logs.