While considering entering the Instructables Colors of the Rainbow Contest, I noticed there was a special prize of a 3D printer for entries that were good examples of each of the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, and another for the best "rainbow" entry. Wanting to maximize my chances at one of these, I decided to figure out which of these colors were least used among the entries at the time (June 4, 2018), then come up with an Instructable based around that color. I scrolled through the entries a few times, but found it hard to keep track. It was obvious "rainbow" was the most popular color, but less obvious what the least popular was. So I made a Rainbow Tally Counter to help me keep track.

Step 1: Code It!

Javascript is an obvious choice for this application. It's an easy way to get a quick graphical interface. You can save the TXT file to your computer, then change it's extension to .html (Instructables doesn't allow HTML files). Then just open the HTML file in your browser.

You'll see that we set up 8 DIVs (boxes) with background colors corresponding to one of the 8 categories (rainbow is denoted by gray, because why not?). Clicking on a box will increase that color's associated counter by one. To reset it, just reload the page.

color_tally.txt
Download

Step 2: The Tally and Results

I opened 2 windows: one with the contest entries to date, the other with my tally counter. As I scrolled through the entries, I tallied which category I thought each entry would fall into. If it might fall under more than one category, I clicked more than one box.

The results?

Rainbow: 62
Blue: 11
Indigo: 8
Red: 7
Green/Yellow: 6 each
Violet: 5
Orange: 4

So I decided to try to come up with an Instructable featuring orange or violet prominently! Let's see if I can think of one.