The history of Bytesize goes all the way back to the late 90s, when we ran a series of streaming "gag" cartoons on the front page of NG. At some point the cartoons went stale and the feature seemed obnoxious, so we scrapped it.

Almost a decade later, we reintroduced Bytesize with the big NG redesign launch of July, 2007. Only this time, it featured a much more expansive selection of cartoons by numerous artists from around the site. I decided it would be fun to give it a permanent place here in the Portal because it would also inevitably vanish from the front page.

2019 rolled along and it was brought to my attention that the player didn't work anymore. Due to a bunch of site changes, the directory with the individual shorts was gone and the whole player was due for an HTTPS update. Since Flash was on its way out, I decided to Swivel the individual entries and combine them into one video.

During this process I realized we had actually been missing a ton of shorts from 2007; I had been using an XML file I manually wrote, before we made an admin tool to add additional shorts. This 2019 update is the first time everything has been available as hi-def video AND the first time a lot of these shorts have been available since the 2007 era.