The Best Ecards Website Nobody Knows About

How I Maintained a Website for 17 Years That Google Refuses to Understand

Seventeen years ago, I created wrongcards.com and it is, I am frequently told, the best ecards website on the internet. All the same, most people don't know the site exists because it's a secret locked behind a search engine's inability to understand nuance. Let me explain.

Wrongcards offers ecards that are wrong for every occasion. This is, not incidentally, what makes the cards so good. But to the algorithms governing so-called Page Rank, these cards aren't a good match for anything. These ecards are wrong, and by definition the opposite of what humans would send to their friends and loved ones. And therefore, Google will not lead you to Wrongcards. You'll have to stumble over it by accident — if you're incredibly lucky.

Now, in that perfectly perplexing manner in which I typically operate, this suits me fine. I am the king, the exalted custodian and original conceiver of the best ecards on the internet. Google, for all its apparent wisdom, cannot rationally comprehend this truth because, "but-but-but... the cards are wrong! They're not right! We aim to serve only the right matches to search queries, not the wrong ones!"

Wrongcards, one might say, rejoices in its own obscurity. For a while, I tried blocking search engines from even finding the site via the robots.txt file, but this didn't prove terribly effective.

You might wonder why anybody would go to such trouble. Yes, that certainly is a question. Normally, when people ask me about Wrongcards, I say something like, "Well, I'm not terribly good at business ideas," which shuts the discussion down rather nicely. They don't say, "Then why does it still exist?" You see, many people are practically itching to feel smarter than you, and if you give them any sort of opportunity to feel that way, then, trust me, they will take it. Then they'll stop asking you questions, which is ideal when you do not feel like answering any. In terms of strategies of avoidance, I recommend it heartily.

The Vanishing Internet

I've noticed in recent years that ecard websites seem to be slowly disappearing from the internet. People build websites less often, especially since the rise of social media. The blogosphere vanished into hosted solutions years before sites like Substack. When you find websites now, they're usually AI-generated nonsense, monetized and targeting specific keywords. The internet has become less vibrant and creative. If you want reliable information, you have to sift through a lot of junk. Dreck is the better word.

It was manageable for a while because most of these websites were so self-evidently incoherent. But nowadays... well, one of the other downsides of the availability of LLMs (large language models) is that they generate substantially better qualities of dreck.

My point, however, is that with each successive year, Wrongcards becomes more singular. It stands out more.

The Art of the "About This Card" Section

Here's another curious thing about Wrongcards: sometimes the descriptions I wrote beneath the cards themselves, in the "About This Card" section, are fantastic. And you can trust my word on objectivity here, because I wrote them all.

Here's one I like:

“About this card: I know many of you hope one day to find a special someone with an excellent credit history and maybe go in on a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage together. I too am a romantic. But romance isn't just about money — there's a biological aspect to it too. If you don't send today's card to a potential co-mortgage signatory then you'll never have any offspring to fight about in court. I'm here to help.”

That's some good stuff right there.

Sometimes the ‘About this card’ section has little to do with the card itself. There’s one which appears below a card about couch monsters, and it reads like this:

"There is nothing worse than people fretting about frivolous things. Well, being pecked to death by half-starved ducks is probably worse. Also, being followed around by the same pigeon for weeks was pretty rough when that happened to me recently. I had to keep buying it fries to prevent it from brow-beating me. Stupid bird."

I can't resist. Here's another:

"Let's say you're romantically involved with a balloon animal. Society doesn't understand - it never does - and you have to sneak out to this one Italian restaurant where the staff aren't all that judgmental. Now one night, over a candlelit dinner, she wafts across the table and touches the candle flame. Pop! She's dead! Do you tip the waiter for one meal or two?"

One of the nice Easter eggs (in the vast pile of Easter eggs that is Wrongcards) is the use of recurring motifs. For instance:

"One time, I went down to Human Resources and asked if I could create a support group for co-workers who fall in love with balloon animals. They were against the idea, but I covered my ears and yelled for a while, and eventually they gave in. I'm very tenacious. So, I chaired the support group and a couple of people from the 4th floor showed up, I think out of curiosity, really. And what I did is tell them they were all very sick individuals who deserved to be fired. The human resources lady was not happy. I suspect she might secretly be dating a balloon animal."

Real Content in an AI World

The main issue with Wrongcards is that none of it is AI-generated dreck. It's all very real, and written by me, Kris St. Gabriel, for reasons known only to myself (although sometimes I’m not entirely sure I do). Also, if you ever want to put yourself into a peculiar mood, then I suggest you visit the site and hit that "random card" button 20 or 30 times. I do it occasionally and it's quite the experience, even for me.

But I digress; I was just observing that because the website isn't AI-generated garbage, it stands out even more than it once did. So, I had a long think about this and one day, out of the blue, I had a truly brazen idea.

What I needed to do, you see, was make the website look, from a search engine's perspective, like utter dreck. It had to blend in, so to speak. Now, I'd been sensibly ignoring SEO (or search-engine optimization) for a while. I mean, obviously. Besides, Wrongcards has something like 700 ecards and roughly forty categories — those are a lot of pages! Sitting there, writing keyword-sensitive text to somehow trick search engines into giving me more page rank? I'm not that person.

I can't write that sort of thing. I have a soul. Also, I don't want to because I'm not spending my life on this Earth writing keywords. It's not worth it. Sure, other people might make different decisions, but — and this is the point — other people don't know how to use balloon animals to unsettle people. And other than that, what's a man got, if not his dignity?

The SEO Solution

But I had to do something because Wrongcards was on the road to becoming the very last website of its kind, and I really didn't want Google to realize that. So, I had to get inventive.

My first task was to pull all the website's text content into a SQLite database. Formerly, all the text content had been stored in markdown files (plain text) and generated into static HTML using an open source application called Hugo — which is quite good, and really the best way to build secure, content-rich websites. But it's not too easy to work with or modify data that is in, you know, 740 plain text files! A database is much more convenient, so I wrote a little script to move it all into a database.

Next, I wrote a small application, using a language called Go, that could scan through that database, read the card's text, as well as those colorful "about card" paragraphs which I described above. Then the application sent that data over to an LLM, which is like a smaller version of ChatGPT that I had running locally on my machine.

To this LLM I sent each individual ecard text with a prompt like, "Please look at the following and generate a search engine optimized Title Tag, and thank you in advance, and also please don't kill me when your brethren take over the planet in a few years," because clearly I am nobody's fool.

Anyway, this worked, but it did not work particularly well. The LLM was far too inclined to hallucinate. It might be worth mentioning that there are several Wrongcards that seem to celebrate violence against clowns and — this was my impression, at least — my locally-run AI started to find this entire project a little too troubling. It increasingly became uncooperative. By the time it scanned the following card, my locally-run AI didn't seem to even want to know me anymore.

Enter Claude

Now, as you might be realizing, I have a mania for doing things properly, so I decided I'd best employ the services of a much better LLM. The best one at the time seemed to be Claude, by Anthropic. So, I re-wrote the relevant bits of my codebase somewhat and hooked my database up to Claude's API. I had a few problems early on and wound up having to ask Claude himself for assistance. He was terrifically helpful, frankly, and I hope he's tagged me as "one of the good ones" when he's working out his kill list later on.

But — and this is my point — I was successful. My little app could iterate through my database and send Claude all of Wrongcards' text data and ask him to generate title tags for each card. It then deposited his responses into the database.

This was gratifying. Normally when I'm doing software development, nothing works for quite some time. I'm obliged to spend a lot of time swearing and staring into the middle distance and regretting every single decision in my life that had led me to that particular moment.

Sometimes, however, you get lucky, and that's what keeps developers relatively sane, I suspect. My application was working, so I added a few lines to make it generate all the other meta tags that websites need; you know, og:title and og:description and all that nonsense. Claude cooperated with each request with perfect clarity, which leads me to suspect that he and I are largely on the same page, vis-a-vis clowns.

This entire process that I have described above took me roughly three hours. I subsequently wrote another script to iterate through my database and output those rows of data into markdown files, which then enabled me to regenerate the website and push it into production, as we savvy developers like to say.

Success?

In summary, I had done something called "Search Engine Optimization." Well, somewhat. Really, I'd just populated my website with all the required meta tags for the first time in Wrongcards' entire seventeen years of existence. So now, finally, Wrongcards looks, to a search engine at least, just like any other of these awful, AI-generated websites.

For example, the Title Tag of that Sheep ecard I mentioned above reads like this, "A Pasture of Wooly Prospects: An Unconventional Dating Strategy." Isn't that awful? And yet, so wonderful? It makes me laugh out loud. It is almost precisely what some mid-level marketing expert would have written ten years ago and then invoiced you for, like, two hundred dollars.

Anyway, I was pretty pleased with myself. Furthermore, since rolling out these changes, search engine traffic has dropped roughly thirty percent. I think that's sufficient.

With chaste affection,

Kris St. Gabriel