When your website makes you smile

Published on October 02, 2025 under the Moments of Joy category.

For most days of the year, the name of my website – James’ Coffee Blog – is followed by a coffee cup emoji. But, on some days, the coffee cup emoji changes. I have a calendar of events for which the emoji changes, including International Day of Peace (September 21st), Burns Night (January 21st), and Web Standards Day (November 30th).

I don’t think about the emojis most of the time. It is only on those occasional days when I go to my site and realise that the emoji has changed that I am intrigued, delighted, or otherwise fascinated. I don’t know International Cat Day off the top of my head, but my website does. As I read my list of seasons, apparently Crisp Sandwich Day is coming up (October 25th). I will surely have to celebrate with a crisp sandwich.

I went to my website today and noticed there is a pumpkin. Why is there a pumpkin? I thought. Oh! It’s the month of Halloween. (Part of me now thinks that the emoji should be the autumn leaves for the first half of the month! I love autumn.)

My website is full of tiny things I made that I occasionally think about or re-discover with joy, like my (occasionally updated for various technical reasons too long to explain here) retro page that shows a (ahem dubiously) “retro” version of my home page. Or my Unicode-character-whose-name-I-can’t-remember-but-brings-me-joy page.

This week, I added another feature to spark joy. Hover over the cat icon and its eyes will open. It’s a small animation, but it makes all the difference.

Happy autumn!