ProjectCool

September 11, 2000 12:04 PM

ProjectCool isn't faring well since Glenn Davis and Teresa Martin left and DevX took over. Sightings isn't being updated and the Future Focus archive was wiped out.
posted by rcade (15 comments total)

Which is altogether unfortunate. I rather looked forward to a new sighting each day.


posted by aladfar at 1:00 PM on September 11, 2000

So did I. But Glenn is alive and kicking at Astounding Web, where it's rumored that he's actually reviewed a site or two.

I check CoolStop religiously too - a new goodie every day for your surfing pleasure, and tons of archives to delve into.
posted by the webmistress at 2:21 PM on September 11, 2000

I never read Project Cool. I think it had something to do with the way the site loaded in my browser of choice on my platform of choice. So much for that.
posted by camworld at 2:36 PM on September 11, 2000

"Cool" sites always depress me. I remember back in the early-to-mid-1990s, when getting named a Cool Site by someone was a virtual guarantee of crashed servers, hit counts through the roof, etc. Nowadays, being named "cool" doesn't seem to get you more than a few hundred hits, maybe a couple of thousand if you're lucky. I don't like to be reminded of how diffused the audience has become, and how it's almost impossible to get any sort of ratings.
posted by aaron at 2:48 PM on September 11, 2000

Yeah, DevX really screwed the pooch on all counts. They really don't understand the web. I've watched them fool around and lose all the good links that PC had because they don't understand content. I guess that's what happens when the only world editors understand is print where things move at the speed of snails.

So, uh, Cam. I guess you were one of my few WebTV visitors? Or was it IE2, NN1 or 2, or Lynx? Those, to my knowledge, were the only browsers the site didn't work well in. I, personally, used it with IE3+, NN3+, and Opera under Windows, MacOS, and Linux. So I know it worked there.


posted by gdavis at 2:52 PM on September 11, 2000

FWIW, when this site got the project cool nod back in January, there were about 8500 page views in a single day, back when 200 a day was normal. Since that fateful day, the traffic, readership, and membership has all gone up. It was sort of a critical mass day where enough people commented on things to keep the community going, and for that I have to give Glen thanks.
posted by mathowie at 4:01 PM on September 11, 2000

This is what I love about metafilter... if someone mentions Glen, Zeldman, Lance, Winer or any other number of web-identities, they're likely to poke their head in and say hi.
Here's hoping: Jakob, what's the likelihood of 'doing lunch' while you're in Sydney? You, me and Bill, eating tacos over a plastic mat. Delicious.
posted by Neale at 5:39 PM on September 11, 2000

When Project Cool launched, I recall trying to visit the site. I think at the time I was using Netscape 4.0 on the Mac. My first impression was miserable. I couldn't get the site to load, or something broke the browser. It might have been javascript. This was early in the site's lifecycle, and I never went back for a second look so some of my early problems may have been fixed. I'm sure Project Cool is (was?) as cool as you all make it seem, but my early opinion of the site seemed to differ.
posted by camworld at 6:54 PM on September 11, 2000

When I first started working on the web I used to check this site out everyday for the cool site of the day. It's how I found Metafilter actually. Lately though I have stopped as the cool site seems to have become less and less cool as time went on. very sad.
posted by Nyarlathotep at 7:48 PM on September 11, 2000

Cam, Glen used to have absolutely bleeding edge dhtml stuff (that was backward compatible). Like as soon as a new browser beta came out, there was something on the project cool site demonstrating it.

I remember the floating-in-from-the-right planet saturn image was one of the first "right aligned" dhtml demoes I'd seen (since CSS is heavy on the top, left x,y axis way of doing things). Perhaps you were there so early, Glen didn't have the browser sniffing down.
posted by mathowie at 7:52 PM on September 11, 2000

Hi, Neale. You left out the .com in my URL. You evil boy. Jakob says hey.
posted by Zeldman at 10:41 PM on September 11, 2000

DevX was bought by Fawcette, so it's hard to say who's responsible for the changes there. Fawcette also bought ThunderLizard and CNET Builder.

Fawcette was also considerate enough to re-assign the ownership of The Web Standards Project and A List Apart to themselves. They let the WaSP domain lapse, and we were initially unable to update it because we were not the "owners."

After three weeks down, WaSP is back online, but we can't update it because the staging server is gone. And we can't tell our members, because the mailing lists are dead.

A List Apart has been down for over a week. We are naturally taking actions to correct these problems. That's all I have to say about that.

CAM: You may be thinking about a specific DHTML area of ProjectCool which was designed to show off IE behaviors (and labeled as such).

Or you may have experienced one version of the site that didn't work properly in IE4/Mac, due to the lame JavaScript handling in that browser (which Microsoft subsequently atoned for when they gave us IE5/Mac).


posted by Zeldman at 10:48 PM on September 11, 2000

No I didn't.
posted by Neale at 10:58 PM on September 11, 2000

Did too, I saw you.
posted by daveadams at 7:09 AM on September 12, 2000

Well thats everyone except for Lance and Winer.
posted by dangerman at 10:53 AM on September 12, 2000