Cool site of the month

Before blogs went mainstream, people called them web logs, because they logged interesting things they found on the web. Finding a cool web site you haven’t seen before happens less often these days, but I’ve seen a few cool things this year.

These days, a web site can do far more than entries on Cool Site of the Day ever could, with the many software technologies that browsers now implement. The results range from technology demonstrations and art projects to a useful software tool.

Earlier

I first started thinking about cool web sties again a couple of years ago, when I first saw this technology demo:

The Shinjuku station three.js demo uses the three.js 3D graphics library to render a model of the famously-complicated Shinjuku Station in Tokyo. The rendering’s cyberpunk aesthetic blurs function and art, making it strangely captivating.

This year, I started to pay more attention to the weirdness that nerds, and other people, share on social media. I welcome the occasional relief from how the big (social) media walled gardens have captured so much of contemporary web experience, and made surfing the web a thing of the past.

January

relax.rikard.io (RELAX) animates water that you can swirl with your ‘finger’, using the mouse, or (on a touchscreen) your actual finger. Relaxing music helps you relax. The result blends art, a way to create art, and something functional – a way to relax.

thisissand.com (THIS IS SAND) pours sand where you point, creating a two-dimensional pile of sand, with coloured layers. The sound of pouring sand somehow makes this even more satisfying. This feels more like an art-creation tool than RELAX, but also satisfying, and therefore relaxing.

February

floor796.com animates floor 796 of ‘a huge space station’, populated with various fictional characters. You can scroll the isometric 3D, to discover its many rooms. You discover this grand art project, rather than creating your own art with it. And when you find, for example, The Dread Pirate Roberts, you can click him to reveal his name and the title of his 1987 cinematic debut.

May

ismy.blue presents a short iterative quiz on whether you see the displayed colour as blue or green. The results page compares your result to the population average, summarised by whether you see turquoise as blue or green. This time, we find a mix of though-provoking entertainment and (dubious) utility, instead of art.

June

justaqrcode.com implements a browser-based QR code generator, with options for size, error correction and colours. This no-frills implementation has a much better user experience than searching the web for QR code generator, and trying your luck there. Best of all, this shows how you can make web-based software as straightforward as a command-line tool, such as libqrencode (installed on a Mac with Homebrew, and brew install qrencode).

📌 As of October 2025, Peter Hilton is available for a new senior product management role (Europe remote, or Rotterdam), and speaking engagements.