(e:kara) made an excellent point in my last journal (e:zobar,53) that nobody gives a good God damn what a website looks like as long as it delivers the goods . I couldn't agree more.

So in that spirit, I thrust both middle fingers skyward and wave them defiantly in the direction of the art department and propose: The Best Ugly Local Website Award. Substitute 'utilitarian' if you must, but you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's that one website that was designed in Netscape Navigator Gold 3.04 about ten years ago that lives in some god-forsaken frameset at greyskull.someancientbbs.net/~skeletor79/Great%20Stuff/default.htm that you still visit all the time because it's the best damn website around. So let's fire up Lynx and get this party started!

At the risk of creating enemies, I nominate Bill Rapaport's ***** INTERACTIVE ***** BUFFALO RESTAURANT GUIDE , which has existed in one form or another since 1988. This guy is a motherfucking machine. Dude's got more restaurants listed than I have any hope of ever going to, and he does it all in HTML3.2. No Quicktime, Flash, AJAX, Javascript, or even CSS, just a huge wealth of information - the World Wide Web as pure as Tim intended *.

So let's hear it! What ugly websites are in your bookmarks?

- Z

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• 'Storage of ASCII text, and display on 24x80 screens, is in the short term sufficient, and essential. Addition of graphics would be an optional extra with very much less penetration for the moment.'