Time Wallpaper

Here is my code for changing the wallpaper of your site at night-time (7pm-5am)

• Make sure the CSS sets the background image using the background-image property (not the all-in-one background property)
• Put it at the bottom of your web page, under the closing html tag.
• Change YOUR-URL-HERE to URL of the night-time wallpaper

Adaptations

Do you want to learn javascript? See if you can work out how to...

• Change the times the wallpaper appears
• Add another if block with a different wallpaper to show more than two wallpapers in a day
• Change the wallpaper on each day of the week
• How would you change other parts of the website, like border colors or elements aside from the body?

Unaskedfor politics

I find melonland's tradition of closing on a Monday really moving. It reminds me of Crary's book 24/7: Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, which describes the bodily and political results of an always-on, always-connected society. He notes there is now nowhere, no time on earth where one cannot be potentially working or shopping, disrupting human-styled cycles and patterns - a process that's been true since the industrial revolution took us away from work which fitted around the natural rhythms of what grows and when animals sleep. He uses the symbol of flickering, light-emitting objects, and what that means for our experience of time when there is no longer ink-dark night. It's a powerful book.

To give your website a day-night cycle is to reject this process, and put it back into the flow of human time. Noticing the website exists within time repositions the visitor in their physical body, in their own space. I was surprised by how meaningful I found the experience of using my website after adding this code - asserting it as a kind of place, and reminding me at night-time, it is time to seek quiet.