I’m Feeling Lucky

The idea for “I’m Feeling Lucky” was initially meant to foster awareness of mindless internet activity. That is, it was meant to have viewers question how on-task they are when they’re on the internet. It’s so easy to get lost in an article, digress, and read or look at other pieces of information when surfing the net.

“I’m Feeling Lucky,” in actuality, facilitates the mindless activity that I had initially hoped to have viewers question. Each time a viewer opens a new tab in Chrome, they’re confronted with a detracting GIF of Homer Simpson and a button with the text “I’m Feeling Lucky” (a direct reference to Google’s own “I’m Feeling Lucky” button).

Once the button is clicked, viewers are taken to Wikipedia pages at random.

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When I first began this project; however, I was hoping to create an extension that would expose any visited website’s source code. I assumed that these extensions already existed (they do), but I refused to look at the code of these pre-existing extensions so that I could actively learn and create code on my own.

After running through several tutorials on Google Chrome Extension’s website, I realized that my understanding was only limited to having the code appear on a pop-up, which I didn’t want. I wanted to wipe the visited website and replace it with the source code, so that any viewer would realize the facade of websites as they are.

Extension and further documentation can be found on Github.