Introduction

This post is written as a confession about a lie we might have said during our workshops that websites are made up only of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Well, there is one special ingredient too. No, it’s not you (if you thought we were hinting at a Kung Fu Panda reference). Okay, so here it is … drumroll … easter eggs. Jains, WAIT! These eggs are well within your dharma so don’t quit reading so soon.

So what are easter eggs? You might guess they won’t be significant since no student group, at least in IIT-R, conducts a workshop about it and you probably haven’t heard of it yet. For starters, think of them as a hidden feature in software. For example, whenever you comment “congratulations” on a post on Facebook, a bunch of celebratory balloons and confetti pops on your screen backed by an exclaiming sound effect. Of course, this feature is not a necessity, but it adds delight to the user experience. Trying to implement a similar idea in the applications we built, we added some easter eggs in Channel-i too, and this post will showcase just a select few of them. If you have been a keen user of our apps, you might have seen some of these gems already 😌.

Before going further, we would like to list some prerequisites so that you can follow through and discover the easter eggs for yourself.

• Although Channel-i works well on all devices, we recommend trying them out on a desktop or a laptop for an optimal experience.
• A Channel-i account is also needed to try out most of them. Make sure you are logged in because some of them are accessible only if you are authenticated.

With that settled, let’s dive right in! A word though, this post is full of spoilers and we’d rather recommend you search for the eggs first rather than just read the walkthrough right away.

Easter Eggs

Console Art

Starting with the most basic and probably a not very exciting easter egg is the console art which is an ASCII text of IMG’s alternate logo embedded in the browser's console. If you are a web developer, you are already aware of a browser’s console but if not, follow the steps to see the graphic.

1. Visit Channel-i and click on “more options” which is usually beside your extensions in the browser.
2. Press Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + J in Google Chrome, or Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + K in Mozilla Firefox, to trigger the console.
3. Scroll to the top, and you will find something like this:

404: Foundn’t

This easter egg is much better and thrilling than the last one, and we are certain that you will agree with us. We created an entirely different blog post dedicated to explaining it as we felt it would be fun to describe the trend and the design behind it. Please check it out here (sorry!).

Apologies for rickrolling (this hyperlink is genuine) you again when the above screen has already rickrolled you many times before. xD

Anyway, this easter egg is pretty much what you did a few seconds ago, and no, we have not written another post to elucidate this. This was a popular meme trend in the late 2000s (and perhaps still is), and due to its popularity, we decided to incorporate it in Channel-i.

A trip to Kasol

IMG cannot help you with all your “stuff”, but it can make your psychedelic experiences, or “trip”, a little more fulfilling. Fire up your consoles again and go to the “Application” tab and click on the “Local Storage” section. Follow the text there and hit refresh. Repeatedly clicking refresh will give you more “bruh moments”!

CEO of Cloud Computing

Question: What happens to cloud storage when it is raining? Have you ever wondered about the “aberrations” in your data because of this natural phenomenon?

To be fair, the answer to this conundrum is beyond the horizon of humankind except for one person (who definitely discovered the above easter egg) and we have tried to make his explanation accessible to all of you. In fact, while we were working on RDrive, we thought to keep the video handy so that one can be aware of the consequences.

Enlighten yourself by translating “cloud” to its Hindi equivalent and then typing it out. We don’t want you to miss out on this easter egg so we are attaching a hint for you.

We hope your data in RDrive isn’t inaccessible when it rains!

Konami Code

… and press “enter” to execute the above code. The output is yet another “console art”. We hope you realise where we are hinting at. 😉

One of our emeritus chief front-end developers, who had a fascination for hamsters, decided to leave his mark on Channel-i. Nothing is better than a JavaScript console for a front-end developer, so you know where he hid it. There you go — another hint!

Meet the artists

This one is the last in the list, but it has the most significance. Channeli and the applications it houses are built by IMG, and we have given the deserved credit to all IMGians in the footer.

However, every project has a few members whose contributions to the project are more radical than others. To recognise their efforts and confer them with due credits, we mentioned their names and GitHub profiles in the footer, but they are three clicks away.

Twice reveals the gate.
Behind which the creators await.
Subtract two clicks from three.
And procure the heart’s key.

If you’re successful in solving the puzzle, your footer will display the significant authors' names and clicking over them, will send you to their GitHub profile. Try it again with different apps and discover their authors. One of them might turn out to be your Bhawan roommate or neighbour!

Conclusion

Since the fun is now coming to an end, let us walk you back to reality. There are indeed only three ingredients HTML, CSS, and JavaScript needed to run the web. An easter egg is also made using these three components. Sorry, we lied again, but we needed your attention, and if you’re reading this paragraph, we do not regret it. 😏

Anyway, since you know enough about it now, we are sure we have put some ideas into your head. We would love it if you can also suggest some creative easter eggs by writing to us or even better, by contributing to our GitHub organisation. We are always looking forward to reviewing pull requests!