Mood
💡 Clever
You will want to know how they built it.
357 sites · page 4 of 8
Answers the question with a single word, and has been right every single time anybody has checked.
A fake enterprise interface that rewards clicking dialogue boxes with more dialogue boxes, by an art-games designer.
- 2 min
- Desktop
The indie storefront where thousands of experiments run free in the browser, and where the deeply strange ones are the point.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Every point-and-click game indie developers have uploaded to itch, most playable in the tab, most made by exactly one person.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Net art from 1995 that looks precisely like your computer failing. View the source: the mess on screen is hiding the actual work.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Drags the guts of a JPEG around with three sliders, producing the smeared colour blocks that only broken files make.
- <1 min
The DOSBox emulator compiled for the browser, and the machinery most of the other DOS-in-a-tab projects are built on.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Space the letters of a word by eye, then see the typographer's answer laid over the top of yours. Reliably humbling.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Teaches touch typing by generating fake words from the letters you keep fumbling, rather than making you copy out prose.
- <1 min
- Desktop
One golf hole a day, built to look trivial and then take nine attempts, with a score everybody can compare.
- 2 min
Start with one enormous dot; every pass of the cursor splits it into four, until the pixels resolve into a picture.
- <1 min
Jason Kottke has been posting the interesting bits of the web since 1998, with no algorithm involved at any point.
- 10 min
Gossip written as media criticism, tracking how celebrity stories get placed and who stands to benefit from the placing.
- 10 min
Free audio courses that teach by making you work out the grammar yourself, made by one person with no adverts.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Ableton's free course on beats, basslines and song structure, taught by handing you the instruments inside the page.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Enter your birthday and watch a live tally of the heartbeats, blinks and steps you have got through so far.
- <1 min
Every lightning strike detected worldwide appears within seconds of the flash, triangulated by a volunteer network of home-built receivers.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Travel outwards at light speed while hearing which radio hits have reached each distance, oldest at the far edge.
- 2 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Draw a track and watch a sledder ride it, a physics toy people have spent years turning into hand-drawn music videos.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Hundreds of small text translators — pirate, medieval, wingdings, uwu — plus a builder for making your own.
- 10 min
Wikipedia's running audit of the things almost everyone believes and almost nobody has ever checked.
- 10 min
Every Wikipedia edit as it happens, rendered as bells and strings, with each new user announced by a whisper.
- <1 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Start with four elements and work towards seven hundred, most of which are jokes you only understand on arrival.
A clean one-minute test built by a support software company that had a very direct professional interest in typing speed.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Analogue horror shaped like a small-town TV station's broadcast archive, including the night it advised everyone to look up.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Draw circles and arrows, press play, and your scribble runs as a working feedback-loop simulation.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Browser sprite editor built around palette discipline, with the specific constraints pixel artists keep asking for.
A convincing macOS desktop rebuilt in Svelte, dock animations included, running entirely inside the browser.
- 10 min
- Desktop
One button, one progress bar, and the firm assurance that everything is now OK, which beats the alternative.
- <1 min
The maker movement's own magazine: projects, tool reviews and the long-running argument about what counts as making something.
- 10 min
Maker Studio
AltFGenerate a fake newspaper clipping, a talking animation or a ransom note. The 2005 internet, rebuilt so it still works.
Every open source project plotted as a landmass, with related repositories clustering into continents you can pan across.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Colour in countries, states or regions and export the result, which is where most of the maps you see argued about online are made.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Street-level photography stitched together from volunteers' dashcams and phones, covering a great many roads no Google car ever drove down.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Pomodoro, custom and kitchen-timer modes with a shareable link, so a whole team can run the same twenty-five minutes.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Search the web with the top million most popular sites removed. What is left is the internet nobody bothers optimising for.
Factory building crossed with tower defence: conveyor belts feed the guns, and the guns hold the line while you fix the belts.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Every train on the Tokyo rail network moving in real time across a 3D map, with the aircraft landing at Haneda thrown in.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Mockly
AltFBuild a convincing fake post, chat or notification for a joke or a mockup. Watermarked so nobody mistakes it for the real thing.
- 10 min
A search engine that crawls the web with its own bot rather than renting results from the giants, and does not track who is searching.
Builds a photo mosaic out of hundreds of your other photos, free to make and zoomable right down to each tile.
- 10 min
- Desktop
A daily logic murder mystery with suspects, weapons and locations, solved by grid deduction in about ten minutes.
- 10 min
Type a band and get a cloud of other bands, positioned by how often listeners like both. Crude, ancient and still weirdly effective.
- 2 min
A non-profit, open-source search engine with its own index, curated by volunteers. Results feel nothing like the big engines, which is the point.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Fictional US national park built inside a colossal living organism, documented entirely as tourist brochures and incident reports.
- 10 min
Live tracking for thousands of satellites, with pass predictions for your postcode and a map of everything above you right now.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Name Origins
AltFType a surname and get where it came from, what it originally meant and where in the world it still clusters.
Georeferenced Ordnance Survey sheets you can fade against satellite imagery to see exactly what got demolished.
- 10 min
- Desktop
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.