Stories and notes from building FleaWinder — a tiny animated circus powered by your keyboard and mouse.
Taking the Circus to Small Screens
FleaWinder was designed for a wide, thin strip above the taskbar — comfortably landscape. Phones are portrait. Making the circus work on small screens meant rethinking the layout without losing what makes it feel alive.
The embeddable widget flips to a tall canvas on mobile, stacking the acts vertically instead of spreading them across a ribbon. Anyone dropping FleaWinder into their own site gets a layout that adapts automatically. Four theme presets (dark, light, warm, cool) and a scale parameter let it blend with whatever surrounds it.
The bigger challenge was legibility. On a phone screen, fleas drawn at desktop scale are just specks. We added a zoom pass that scales up flea bodies so their costumes, expressions, and accessories are actually visible — Pip's headband, Rex's helmet, Blaze's tiny crown. The personality details that were always there suddenly read at arm's length.
The rest of the mobile overhaul was less glamorous but just as important: touch-friendly tap targets, better font scaling, responsive spacing throughout the marketing site. Nothing revolutionary — just making sure the circus looks right wherever you find it.
Costumes, Seasons, and a Ringmaster
This week was all about visual depth. Each flea in the colony now wears a unique costume — Nova has a parasol on the tightrope, Rex wears a helmet in the cannon, Blaze gets a crown for the fire-breathing act. Small details, but they give each performer an identity you can spot at a glance.
The stage itself changes with the calendar. A seasonal particle system drops snow in winter, cherry blossoms in spring, fireflies in summer, and drifting leaves in autumn. There's also a subtle day/night tint tied to your real-world clock — the strip warms up at golden hour and dims after dark, with brighter stars in the night sky.
The biggest addition is the Ringmaster — a special flea in a top hat who strolls between acts, inspecting the show. He doesn't perform; he supervises. Getting his patrol path right meant spacing his walks so he arrives just as an act transition finishes, which gives the whole circus a sense of choreography it didn't have before.
Under the hood, a full theme system now powers all of this. Eight colour palettes plus an auto-seasonal mode that picks the right one based on the month. Every colour in every act and UI element pulls from the active theme, so switching feels seamless rather than bolted on.
v1.1.0: Two New Acts
Version 1.1.0 adds the Juggling Act and Fire Breather to the roster, bringing the total to seven live circus acts. Both run on the same energy system that drives the rest of the show — your keystrokes, mouse movements, and clicks.
The Juggler tracks multiple balls in true parabolic arcs. The count scales with energy: two or three at idle, up to six at full power, with behind-the-back catches when the crowd goes wild. Getting the timing right required decoupling each ball’s phase so they don’t clump.
The Fire Breather uses the existing particle system but with a new heat-shimmer effect. Flame length grows with energy, and clicks produce bonus bursts. The trickiest part was colour blending — transitioning smoothly from deep red at the base to bright yellow at the tip without looking banded.
Both acts slot into the existing rotation system, so you’ll see them swap in and out alongside the original five. If you want to pin a favourite, the Settings panel now lets you toggle individual acts on and off.
The History Behind the History Page
FleaWinder’s history page documents over four hundred years of real flea circuses — from Robert Hooke’s microscope sketches in 1665 to the Oktoberfest performers still working today. Writing it meant reading Victorian playbills, digitised newspaper clippings, and a surprising number of academic papers on entomological entertainment.
The hardest part was deciding what to leave out. Louis Bertolotto alone could fill a book (and he did — several, in fact). The compromise was a timeline that hits the major beats and a set of expandable sections for anyone who wants to dig deeper.
The page uses drop caps, ornamental dividers, and a serif typeface to echo the broadsheets and playbills it describes. Every section collapses by default so the reader isn’t overwhelmed, but the first paragraph is always visible with a drop cap to pull you in.
All text is available in English, Spanish, and German. The translation process surfaced some fascinating local history — German Flohzirkus traditions at Oktoberfest, for instance, have their own lineage distinct from the London and New York scenes.
Why I Built FleaWinder
I wanted something that made the computer feel alive — not in a distracting way, but as a quiet companion that responds to your presence. Most screensavers activate when you leave; FleaWinder activates when you arrive.
The idea was simple: take all the idle input your operating system ignores — the rhythm of your typing, the speed of your mouse, the cadence of your clicks — and feed it to a troupe of animated circus fleas. The more you work, the more the show comes alive.
Building it as a transparent overlay above the taskbar turned out to be the right constraint. It’s always visible but never in the way. You don’t interact with it directly; you just work, and it reacts. The technical challenge was making it truly click-through so it never steals focus.
FleaWinder is a love letter to the Victorian flea circus — a real, centuries-old art form where watchmakers harnessed actual fleas to pull miniature carriages and walk tightropes. The history page tells that story in full.
