Image of a JoCo gift tag

MyQRLink.org

A rather silly thing Keith made because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

About MyQRLink.org

    What does it do?

    • Keith makes various items, currently small metal tags with a QRCode engraved onto them, and gives them away to people he knows or likes or just happens to be nearby. If someone scans that code with their phone, they end up at this website.

    That seems kind of cool. What might I do with it?

    • Well, you could put the tag on your keychain, and then login here once and set the message to "Hey, these are my keys; if you find them give me a call at XXX-YYY-ZZZZ or email me at thisismyemail@someemailsite.com.", and then if someone finds your keys they might get them back to you.

    • Or, if you've got a website with your cool art, or stories, and you want to tell people about it sometimes, but it's complicated to type, when you want to do that you can just say "Hey, scan this kind-of-durable thing I have here on my person which also reminds me about this neat cruise I take ever year -- and, maybe I'll tell you about the cruise."

    Why did you do this, Keith?

    • Glad you asked, he said, although it does seem like this is less a conversation and more of a series of leading questions that were typed stream-of-consiounness format in a rush just before getting onto a ship.

    • Anyway, I've been making these little tags for like eight years for every JoCo Cruise, and then I hand them out to anyone that wants one. It's a reason to walk around and introduce myself to people, and since I'm knid of an introvert it's helped me meet a bunch of folks, and I've made friends and folks I know. The tags themselves I buy from a company in Canada, who sells in bulk as pieces to make scale mail armor. They come in various colors; I buy the red and gold ones for Red and Gold Squadron and then I engrave a boat on the one side and buy little clips and put the together and hand them out.

    • Early on I used a laser engraver down at a maker space I had a membership in, and I only made a few hundred, but a few years ago I bought a nice laser that sits in my garage and I make about 1200 of them. Some folks tell me they like collecting them from previous years, or because they're just something small that reminds them about their adventure. But, they're also kind of useless, mostly, and so I was trying to think of some way to make them a bit more useful. I'd long wondered whether I should put something onto the other side, and once almost just put the same logo on both sides of every tag, but didn't get around to it since it would have doubled the time on the laser.

    • Anyway, long story long, on the boat in 2024, I had the idea that I could put a QR code on the back, and then I could have it point to JoCoCruise.com, but I don't actually own JocCoCruise.com and I didn't want to imply that these were somehow offical, so I didn't do it. They I was like, what if every tag had a different destination URL, or just some really fun URL, but that just turned into a "what would be the right URL" and I could'nt decide.

    • Then, I was like, what if everyone could decide what they wanted it to do, but that meant I would need to create a website and let people do that, and that would be really easy, except I'm a pretty low-level OS software engineer and creating a website is not my area of expertise, but how hard can it be? And then I procrastinated. Until about a month before the deadline, and then I had to furiously learn how to do all of that stuff, and it was stressful and there were bunches of times I wis like "Nope, not going to happen", but it kind of looks like I got a pretty minmial alpha 1 working and so it's "Ship it".

    Is this going to work forever? Can I rely on this for some mission critical thing?

    Um, please don't rely on this. I'll try to keep this running, but the future is long and someday it will certainly break and I won't know how to fix it. Or I might be dead, because that meteor killed all of us.