Mood
💡 Clever
You will want to know how they built it.
357 sites · page 1 of 8
Disposable inbox that self-destructs after ten minutes. Exactly what you want when a download demands an email address first.
- <1 min
The Myers-Briggs-flavoured test everybody has taken, with a four-letter verdict and profile pages that are unnervingly specific.
- 10 min
A directory of blogs and tools that load in under one megabyte, kept as a quiet protest against bloated pages. Every link opens almost instantly.
- 10 min
- Desktop
A ranked list of websites that weigh less than half a megabyte. A tour of the fast, lightweight personal web, sorted from tiniest to merely small.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Seventy statements, four political axes and an ideology label at the end. The open-source template for a hundred imitators.
- 10 min
Windows 98 rebuilt in JavaScript, right down to the window chrome and the sound the error dialogs make.
Starts as one button beside a dying fire and quietly becomes something much larger. Best played without reading anything about it first.
- 1 hr+
Hand-picked, highly rated films that were never blockbusters, filterable by mood and by where you can currently stream them.
- 2 min
Unfiltered aircraft tracking, including the private jets and military flights that the commercial trackers politely agree to hide.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Upload a child's drawing of a person and it finds the limbs, rigs them and makes the figure dance. Research that turned out purely delightful.
- 10 min
Recommendation-led catalogue with if-you-liked-this chains going back to 2001, plus legal streaming links for each title.
- 10 min
Gianni Sarcone's workshop of puzzles and illusions, half optical trickery and half mathematical recreation, running since the 1990s.
- 10 min
Takes a permanent snapshot of a page on demand, including ones the Wayback Machine will not capture. Useful when a page is about to change.
- 2 min
A survivor of the Flash era that converted its best strategy and adventure titles rather than letting them quietly die.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Draws boxes, arrows and flowcharts entirely out of monospace characters, for diagrams that live inside code comments.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Recorded terminal sessions replayed as selectable text, genuinely useful to learn from and indistinguishable from real work.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Drop an asteroid of your chosen size on any address and read back the fireball, wind speed and earthquake radius it makes.
Draw a wonky shape and it offers professional illustrations of what it thinks you meant. Ruthlessly effective on anyone who cannot draw.
- <1 min
A straightforward cartoon portrait builder with vector output, useful for when a real profile photo is genuinely not an option.
- <1 min
One song revealed a single instrument at a time, six guesses, one puzzle a day. Needs headphones and a decent musical memory.
- 2 min
- Sound on
Minimalist colour puzzle rooms — yellow, blue, red — where every level teaches you a rule the game never states out loud.
- 10 min
Engineering essays with live diagrams you drag — gears, lenses, GPS, sound — each the clearest thing ever written on its subject.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Chiptune tracker with a whole song's worth of channels, shareable as a URL that contains the entire tune inside it.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
A company worth hundreds of billions serves a homepage of plain blue links, unchanged since the 1990s and quietly proud of it.
- <1 min
Annual contest in which vision scientists compete to fool you, with every finalist since 2005 still watchable.
- 10 min
A daily showcase of early-stage startups looking for their first users, sorted by topic. A preview of what might be everywhere next year.
A countdown big enough to read from the back of the room, which is the only real requirement a workshop timer has.
- <1 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Cyberpunk progression game where the way forward is writing real JavaScript to automate your own hacking. Learning it is the game.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Anonymous celebrity riddles where readers do the detective work in the comments and are occasionally proved right.
- 10 min
The volunteer lightning detection network behind most live strike maps, with raw data and instructions for building your own receiver.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Drag four blobs up and down and they sing genuine four-part harmony, trained on real opera singers, always in key.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Several hundred properly licensed board games with the rules enforced for you, so nobody argues about whether that move was legal.
- 10 min
Ben Eater's flocking simulation with the three rules exposed as sliders, so you can break the flock deliberately.
- <1 min
- Desktop
A long-running directory of wonderful things: odd gadgets, art, science and internet culture, posted every day by a small team of editors.
A blog that has been finding the best browser escape and point-and-click games every week since 2005, and is still posting.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Code-breaking tools and a cipher identifier for when you have a string of nonsense and no idea what it is.
- <1 min
Plain, well-sorted illusion collection with the explanation directly underneath each one, from café walls to impossible triangles.
- 10 min
A search engine built on its own independent index with no profiling of searchers, and filters that let anyone re-rank results by their own rules.
A German board game world that has hosted Carcassonne and Puerto Rico since 2001, complete with a slightly baffling lobby.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Plays the notification sounds of Slack, email and Teams on a loop so it sounds like somebody urgently needs you.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Two near-identical interfaces, one of them subtly wrong. Getting past the third level takes an unreasonable amount of care.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Opens as ASCII candy counting up on a blank page and quietly becomes a full role-playing game with a sea, a shop and a dragon.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
A free endpoint that returns one cat fact per request, which is how every cat-facts prank bot ever built gets built.
- 2 min
Per-component checklists — buttons, forms, cards, empty states — covering the things everyone forgets until review.
- 10 min
Fourteen small experiments — spectrogram, harmonics, arpeggios — that explain how music works by letting you break it.
- 10 min
- Sound on
How far you can get by train from any European station in five hours, drawn as coloured bands. Ruinous for an afternoon's productivity.
- 10 min
Renders every road in any city as white lines on black and nothing else, which turns an ordinary street plan into unexpectedly good art.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Paint over the tourist, the bin or the power line and it fills in whatever should have been behind them.
- <1 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.
Clever websites: questions
How many sites are in clever websites?
357 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 8 of them are AltF originals that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
347 of the 357 are free and need no account. 1 is paid or freemium, and the card says so.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
185 of 357 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 357 are safe for work and 323 work with the sound off.