A list of some of my favourite web pages from back in the day, when the web was unique, quirky, amateur, brilliant, and inspiring, plus some newer ones in the same spirit. I’ll add to this as and when they pop into my head.
Scott Pakin’s automatic complaint-letter generator
When I first used this, it felt like magic. Comedy gold, but magic. In those early days, this kind of clever programmatic output from a web page was so rare. It really showed the potential of the web as an interface to expose deeper complexity.
Million Dollar Homepage
I was so jealous of this. What a genius idea, simple to build but exceptionally hard to execute. Selling a grid of 1000 x 1000 pixels for a dollar a pop, with virality making them more and more desirable until the final few were auctioned off. The PR side was brilliant, with coverage across the global media – this was way before social media, so it was old school t’internet word of mouth.
Favicon poster project
This has a special place as I have a poster of this on my wall, with one of my old websites appearing in the mass of favicons. Another very clever project, and an early use of large data sets and imaginative visualisation.
DMOZ
The crowd-sourced, human-edited web directory that was a rival to Yahoo. It inspires fond memories as we cynically exploited it as an SEO route to Google ranking – get into DMOZ, which fed into Yahoo, which gave a significant page rank boost in Google organic search. In those first few years of Google, following our previous SEO success with Altavista, DMOZ was a very useful tool. Looking back, our actions maybe were a sign of the downfall of the web, with exploitation ruining all the good stuff. Apologies if so.
Game Of Life in Game Of Life
A simulation of Conway’s Game Of Life built within Conway’s Game Of Life. If you can get your head around this, you are a better person than me. Absolute genius.