What it does
Give VT alumni, students, and fans one warm, personality-led place to revisit campus history: buildings, demolished dorms, a time-machine map, and community polls.
Currently
Moved to its own domain as Hokie Hokie Hokie Hi (hokiehokiehokiehi.com), named for the 1896 Old Hokie cheer, and every old k8mak.com/118b link lands on the matching page. It grew from a building directory into a traditions site: 15 long-form stories (the cheer, the HokieBird, Enter Sandman, Skipper, the Pylons, the first Black students and more), each built only from a sourced research canon of 203 sources, plus a ten-question quiz with shareable scores, two small games (tap the Old Hokie on the beat, and a jump meter ranked against Lane Stadium seismograph readings), and a map that can colour campus by architectural era or walk you through the Hokie Stone story. The 77 building pages, timeline and community polls came along unchanged, with sourced corrections to about 30 records.
Recently shipped
- Oct 17, 2026Moved to hokiehokiehokiehi.com and renamed Hokie Hokie Hokie Hi. Added 15 sourced tradition stories, a quiz, the $5 Yell and Seismo-Jump games, an architecture-era map view and a Hokie Stone walking route.
- Jun 24, 2026Added sticky scroll-spy decade nav to the timeline so you always know which era you are in as you scroll.
- Jun 10, 2026Reimagined 118B from a single map into a multi-page fan site: magazine homepage, building directory, 77 building pages, timeline, simplified map, plus a security and accessibility launch gate.
- Jun 4, 2026Shipped community era polls with seeded votes, plus onboarding, share URLs, era presets, and a Blacksburg weather badge.
- Mar 25, 2026Shipped the original campus time machine: an interactive VT map with a timeline slider.
How it's built
How I built it
I went to Virginia Tech from 2008 to 2012, and 118B is named for the I-81 exit that drops you into Blacksburg. It started as a campus time machine, a map you could scrub through the decades, but the more I built it the more I realized the map was the smallest part of the story. People do not come back for a map, they come back for the feeling of the place. So I reframed it into a content-led fan site and demoted the map to one component among many. The decision I am proudest of is competing on personality instead of utility: VT already has official tools, and they are fine and forgettable. This one is for the Hokies who actually lived there.