Collection
Good on a phone
Plenty of the classic web assumes a mouse and a wide window. Everything in this collection holds up on mobile.
857 sites · page 11 of 18
London online radio with thousands of shows in the archive, most presented by somebody with an unreasonable record collection.
- 10 min
- Sound on
The pop-tart cat, the rainbow and the song, with a counter for how many seconds of your life you have handed over.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Nine hundred thousand digitised items from the New York Public Library, a large share of it public domain.
- 10 min
Tagged great whites ping their position whenever a fin breaks the surface, each shark named, weighed and given its own profile page.
Feed of products that should not exist, from bacon-scented soap to a hammock designed to hang under your desk.
- 10 min
The LiveJournal community that outlived LiveJournal, still posting celebrity news with the comment threads doing the work.
Eldritch horror podcast set in an alternate Appalachia where the mountains are older than people and considerably less friendly.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Search hundreds of thousands of scanned historical maps by place and date, held by libraries worldwide.
- 10 min
Radio drama, comedy and serials from before television took over, in quantities that would take several lifetimes to finish.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
An encyclopedia of the world's writing systems, including the invented, the extinct and the barely attested.
A million checkboxes shared by everyone at once. Ticking them was pointless right up until people started writing messages in binary.
One minute of footage from a park somewhere in the world, matched to the exact minute you happen to be watching.
- 2 min
- Sound on
Screenshots of archived GeoCities pages posted automatically, one after another, as a rolling portrait of the amateur web.
- 10 min
Where English words came from, sourced and dated, compiled by one man who has been at it since 2000.
- <1 min
The English-speaking world's Go server, where correspondence games run for weeks and somebody always explains why your move was bad.
- 10 min
Station listings for nearly every country, each with a playlist history so you can identify the track that finished before you looked up.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Hand-curated index of several thousand active blogs, sorted by subject, for when you want writing rather than a feed.
A daily index of the free courses, audiobooks, films and ebooks scattered across the rest of the internet.
- 10 min
Scan a barcode and get ingredients, additives and a nutrition score from a database anyone can edit. Wikipedia for groceries.
- 2 min
A catalogue page for every book ever published, a good many of them borrowable straight in the browser.
- 10 min
A hand-drawn library of mix-and-match people, free for anything, and quietly the source of half the internet's illustrations.
Open-source successor to Territorial.io: push borders across a world map, form alliances and break them at precisely the right moment.
- 10 min
Open-source emoji set drawn by design students, free to use, and in several places noticeably better than the defaults.
- 10 min
Searches around a billion openly licensed images and audio files, with the licence terms attached to every single result.
A sealed glass sphere of water, sand and brine shrimp that you seed and then leave running, ecosystem permitting.
Oxford's open charts on poverty, energy, health and war, with the underlying data downloadable from every single one.
John McLeod's encyclopedia of card game rules, covering every regional variant of everything and settling every dispute.
- 1 hr+
The New York Post's gossip column, now its own site, still running on restaurant tip-offs and unnamed sources.
- 10 min
Colourises black-and-white photographs, then lets you steer the result by describing the colours you wanted in words.
- 2 min
Build sundaes to order under mounting time pressure, the most polished entry in a series about the dignity of service work.
- 10 min
The original of the Papa's series, where tips fund your upgrades and customers absolutely notice an undercooked base.
- 10 min
Fold a paper plane, throw it, and catch one somebody launched in another country. Nothing else happens, which is the point.
Scroll to unroll an infinite toilet roll and scroll back to wind it up, presented by the artist with a completely straight face.
- <1 min
Claim territory by driving loops around it while everyone else tries to clip your tail before you make it home.
- <1 min
Noughts and crosses, gomoku and Connect Four against a real stranger, matched in about four seconds with no signup.
- <1 min
Drag mildly biased shapes around a grid and watch a segregated neighbourhood assemble itself without anyone intending it.
Race a crowd of runners up a rooftop obstacle course where the only real skill is jumping at the right half-second.
- 2 min
A big set of free PDF tools in the browser: merge, split, compress, convert and sign documents without creating an account first.
Penalty shootouts through a whole tournament, against a keeper who reads your run-up better than you would like.
- 2 min
The longest-running games comic on the web, three strips a week since 1998, plus the posts that built an industry.
Random generators for anything, built from plain text lists you can fork and edit yourself. Thousands of community ones already exist.
- 10 min
Draw a circle with one unbroken stroke and get scored on how round it actually was. Nobody beats 97% on a trackpad.
A crowd-voted encyclopaedia arguing over the MBTI and enneagram type of every fictional character and public figure in existence.
Personality Lab
AltFProper trait questionnaires with the scoring shown, rather than a quiz that decides you are a golden retriever.
- 10 min
A hand-drawn character builder in the Open Peeps style, producing an avatar that does not look machine-generated.
- <1 min
Every adoptable animal in a hundred thousand shelters, searchable by postcode, which is dangerous browsing after 11pm.
Sixteen questions sort you into one of Pew's nine American political groups, with a decade of real survey data behind every one.
Colorado's library of physics, chemistry and maths simulations, used in classrooms everywhere and free to meddle with.
- 10 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Good on a phone: questions
How many sites are in “Good on a phone”?
857 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 16 of them are AltF originals that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
819 of the 857 are free and need no account. 5 are paid or freemium, and the card says so.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
857 of 857 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 853 are safe for work and 760 work with the sound off.