June 13, 2001

1:10 PM

Become a Netmogul (Isn't it time you RTFM?)Carl Steadman and his fellow Suckites compile a tribute to the Dotcom boom. Sample paragraph: "Want to get into work at 11, spend most of the afternoon swapping email with your pals, and fill the remainder of your workday with Quake deathmatches and figuring out what you're going to do with your million-dollar options package once it's vested? Become an engineer!" [via Boing Boing]
posted by timothompson (11 comments total)

Gag, what a wretched design! But, then, consider the source.
posted by Iberaband at 1:22 PM on June 13, 2001

I enjoyed it. Even the design. I miss the orginal sucksters' writing. Glad to see this is still up.
posted by perplexed at 1:38 PM on June 13, 2001

Wretched design? Hardly.

The text is a little hard to read (too small) and the red on black isn't for everyone (but that's subjective), but the interface design is quite nice. Click into a chapter and it's easy to find your way back a chapter or two...or to the table of contents. After you're done reading a chapter, the summaries for the next chapters appear at the bottom of the text.

The interface is simple, fast, appropriate for the information being displayed, and it isn't a 600K Flash movie with all sorts of extraneous elements whizzing about.
posted by jkottke at 2:47 PM on June 13, 2001

Yes, the interface is also remarkably easy to use if one if looking to enjoy some quality eyestrain.
posted by Mid at 2:51 PM on June 13, 2001

funny, in a painful/cathartic way. it was fun to ride that wave for a while, to make silly amounts of money for surfing the web, to feel like you were at the center of...well, an enormous bubble, it turned out, but hey man, you were there.
posted by lbergstr at 2:53 PM on June 13, 2001

From the README:

Q: Care to explain the interface?

A: You may be unfamiliar with the metaphor I've employed throughout the site's design. I like to refer to it as "CSS-is-a-fucking-nightmare-I'll-take-my-chances-with-ASCII." Basically it's one part AppleWorks on the Apple //, one part Citadel BBS. Toss in "green when the NASDAQ's up, red when the NASDAQ's down" along with the intent to drop in some additional interface elements to make it all a bit more obvious, which of course was never got around to, and here we are, wallowing in our own special kind of perfection.

Lest we forget that there's a metaphor at hand.

I spent my formative years on BBSs and I can't say that I didn't smile when I saw the Netmogul interface.

I especially like the "green when the NASDAQ's up, red when the NASDAQ's down" touch.

But maybe I'm bias.
posted by mgtrott at 3:29 PM on June 13, 2001

make that biased.
posted by mgtrott at 4:01 PM on June 13, 2001

I think its great. Better than another boring 3 column layout, and nice to see ascii still being put to use in an age of css page formatting (which, don't get me wrong, is probably a good thing. ascii is just wonderfully low tech). But, my opinions haven't always been popular.
posted by Hackworth at 4:39 PM on June 13, 2001

The design is brilliant! It's freaking hilarious! Love the Lorem ipsum.

Finally, the shotgun marriage of Suck-when-it-was-funny and Need to Know.

Brilliant.
posted by textist at 4:50 PM on June 13, 2001

Am I allowed to comment on this? Well, I will anyway.

The design's all Carl's: I saw an early version of the interface which was a kind of clunky frames-n-php, then forgot my password to the closed site. Now it's back to basics, and I really love it. And you should see the board for "Netmogul: The Game" -- it's fucking hilarious.

It's strange, though, to read the pieces on the down-side of the boom, especially with the cryogenesis of Suck and FEED. "It'll never last," I said in the spring of 1999. "People can't sustain a delusion, even if it's a coherent one. Reality will always break through."

(Oh, want to share your portfolio with us, Iberaband? I'd be curious to know of your contribution to the web over the past eight years.)
posted by holgate at 5:50 AM on June 14, 2001

i like the look a lot, its the freshest approach i've seen in a while

if you find it hard to read, disabling css (or applying your own) takes about 2 seconds in user friendly browsers....
posted by sawks at 11:17 AM on June 14, 2001