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Awards a go-go
Here's an interesting factoid: once your site starts reeling in a respectable number of hits, you start to "win" the oddest awards - from the "some ISP in Nova Scotia nifty site of the day" to "bubba be liking your page award" - all of them looking for traffic from reverse-links from the icons they presume will we given choice placement on your home page.
Sorry if that sounds ungrateful - we're proud as hell of having won Cruel Site of the Day (Mark said he was going to put it on his résumé - he's probably not kidding) and while Yorick's Pig's Ear isn't quite as prestigious, it's certainly unique ... but then it kind of snowballed...
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Today, public access - tomorrow, the world!
We seem to be gaining momentum among bush-leage television shows that air at 3 a.m. on channels nobody watches. Seems FUGLY was featured, or at least mentioned, on The Wild Wild Web, and the dozen or so people who were watching all "flooded" our site.
We prolly would have missed this (it takes about 20 hits before anything registers on our radar), but Joe was goofing with the log files to see if the folks at the DOJ were still keeping an eye on us.
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WSS Pick of the Week
We got a corporate seal of approval from WebSideStory, Inc. - which runs a "Top 1000 sites (that display
our icon)" campaign - a bit hokey, but certainly useful since our ISP provides
a random log nuker at no extra charge.
Tony D, the intern who picks the sites, sez "Some people just have too much free time on their hands!" - and we couldn't agree more.
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Not Quite CSoD
Somebody tipped us we made CSoD for February 1, 1999 -
but the stats didn't show much difference. Dubious, we checked the referrers to see
what was up (or, more accurately, what wasn't up) only to find that the "C" stood for
Conk. What a gyp!
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Worst of the Web
Mixed blessings abound when your site is chosen to be among the
Worst of the Web -
from their remarks, looks like they enjoyed the site, but gratuitous use of JavaScript ticked
them off. Gee, we haven't heard that before.
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Net Talk Live
FUGLY was featured as a "Hotsite" [sic] for 26 December 98 by Net Talk Live, a sundicated program whose gormless staff doles out half-baked advice to preserve ignorance among the uninformed. I think my boss tunes in a lot.
As a note, we surfed the site looking for a head-shot of "Georgia", who promo-ed FUGLY, cos we figgered ...
- Chicks from Texas tend to be mighty unsightly
- Chicks who are into technology, likewise
- Chicks on the radio are too ugly for television
Unfortunately, her profile page contained the photo to the right - nothing that will make anyone pant, but not quite down to FUGLY standards.
Guess you can't win 'em all.
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KWOD
Sacramento Radio Station KWOD featured
FUGLY as a "pick of the day." There's prolly not anything
spectacular about that, but "Kay-Wad" has a nice ring to it.
PostScript: we found out that the folks at KWOD have probably never seen the site - they subscribe to the same content service as a few dozen other jerkwater radio stations, so we were "pick of the day" for a lot of folks who don't have enough Internet savvy to do their own picking, but want to attract the interest of an Internet-savvy audience all the same.
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Dig digiday
A site called digiday chose FUGLY as its "Site of the Day" for December 18, 1998. Their graphic, though, is about the size of a banner ad, so we've scaled it down a bit:
I guess the next step in the evolution is for "award" sites to "honor" more popular
sites with an entire Web page. "Please replace your home page with the attached one,
which has fifteen links to our page and one to the rest of your site. You may notice
a temporary interruption in traffic ..."
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Seven Wonders
Here's one we've actually heard of: Seven Wonders of the Web - it was once a popular award site, then it kinda vanished. This could be a reincarnation, or an imitation. In either case, they sent us about thirty visitors the day we "won" the award, which is cool enough to give them a reverse link.
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Merci boucoup very much!
FUGLY was also selected as
"Site
du Jour of the Day" for November 26, 1998 (Thanksgiving Day, ironically
enough). Kinda nice to see that even folks that produce family-friendly
"art" like this saccharine little blue-bird appreciate our kinda humor.
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We don't offer awards, but here's one anyway ...
Here's one from the area at a site called "Animal House." We
checked their site to see what other sites had "won" ('cos FUGLY is usually
in pretty odd company) only to find that they didn't have an "awards" page
at all, just wanted us to send them traffic so they can rook people into
joining their happy commune of spam-fodder. Guess again, Flounder.
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The invisible "Road to Nowhere"?
This is undoubtedly the most Existential award we've ever received:
akira@vol.com says:
Your site was recently chosen as a site ...
No kidding? I'd really like to see your apartment, recently chosen as an apartment, with a couch labeled "couch" and a kitchen selected to be the kitchen filled with tins of food that have been selected as food.
We'd choose you to be yourself, but we're so impressed by your proficiency in the art of identifying things as themselves that we feel terribly underqualified to make that assessment.
Included below is a banner for that site. We'd really appreciate it if you could stick a link to us in your "Response" section.
The odd thing is, no "banner" was attached and no URL was provided for a link. Go figure.
So here you go, Akira-san, Shik-Tsau Sifu of the Redundant Art of Redundancy Art: we're proudly displaying the invisible graphic you sent (it's on the home page, too, at the very top) and providing a link that goes to no URL.
And though it's been said, many times, many ways ... thanks for nothing. Honestly.
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