Following the last post I actually wanted to say more about recent FWA Site of the Month awards.

A year ago or so browsing recent submissions and SOTD winners I started comparing them with oldschool sites. The ones from 2000-2004. It looked like to win an FWA you needed a lot of video and 3d. Nobody cares how much a site “weighs” these days. I remember how we invented different tricks to overcome numerous limitations, how we coded realtime effects and used vector animation. Today whoever has more videos and prerendered 3d wins.

I remember we had preloaders, people waited minutes(!) while the site was loading. I remember I made a 6Mb site and had to listen to people complaining that it was too big. Many visitors failed to wait that long for the site to load. Now let’s check FWA Site of the Month winners once again. Initial size is the size in megabytes of whatever had to be loaded before I could proceed. Total size is how much megabytes the site downloaded while I was browsing it a bit. I tried not to view videos and other media content (on sites which are not interactive videos by design).

• January, Lego Star Wars — initial: 8.53Mb, total: 34.6Mb. I liked this one. Good art, animations and navigation.
• February, Die Hipster — initial: 31.21Mb, total: 33Mb. Didn’t get what to do so I closed the game. Looks like it preloaded almost everything just to start.
• March, Greenpeace – A New Warrior —initial: 28.75Mb, total: 41.45Mb. Good site, but the video during loading and total 28.75Mb of data just to show main interface is disturbing.
• April, Wall of Fame —  initial: 15.06Mb, total: 126Mb. What the hell do they have in these 15 megabytes? But at least they got it right and don’t load the whole map at once.
• May, Pleasure Hunt — initial: 43.69Mb, total: 43.69Mb. This site just has to be fully preloaded because it’s a straight forward experience. But 43 megabytes…
• June, 3 Dreams of Black — initial: 43.49Mb, total: 73.85Mb. This one might be a great WebGL demo (as in demoscene) but 73 megabytes is nowhere near.
• July, The Museum of Me — initial: 46.11Mb, total: 61.5Mb. All right, a dynamic video has to be big.
• August, Sexy Fingers — initial: -Mb, total: -Mb. This is total sh*t and doesn’t load on my PC. I blame Flashblock.
• September, The Planet Zero — initial: 2.19Mb, total: 5.75Mb. Now THIS is an oldschool site. It’s really great! Checked every corner of the tiny little planet and only 6 megabytes downloaded.
• October, Being Henry — initial: 20.05Mb, total: 214Mb. Allright, that’s what I was talking about. Just make a huge video and win a SOTM award. But I actually liked it.
• November, The Honda Experiment — initial: 4.44Mb, total: 9.56Mb. I don’t get it. The idea with multi-windowed interface was around since 2000. Everyone hated it because of the reflex to close small pop-up windows.
• December, Androp Bell — initial: 41.98Mb, total: 46.48Mb. An interactive music game, I wonder how long I would have to wait with my 256kbit connection.

Once upon a time there was a small site — favouritewebsiteawards.com/. Years 2000 – 2004 were the golden age of Flash sites. They were interactive, colorful and heavy. At that time I had a blog at valyard.ru with daily links to the coolest sites and games. I bet it had been one of FWA’s link sources for a while.

Since then FWA has grown into a well-known and respected award in the industry of  Flash sites, my resource has well been forgotten.

But recently (a couple of years ago) favouritewebsiteawards transformed into favouriteeverythingawards featuring really everything on the net and some offline stuff. How can you compare a heavy interactive informative site with great UI and lot’s of videos with a WebGL experiment, or a music video, or an offline installation? Let’s examine this year’s Sites of the Month:

• January, Lego Star Wars — Half game (which is supposed to be multi-player, but I was alone ther), half site with great graphics and animation.
• February, Die Hipster — Looks like a game where I don’t gave a clue what I am supposed to do, so I don’t like it q:
• March, Greenpeace – A New Warrior — This is a typical multi-media content site which is well-done, contains a lot of data and serves some real purpose.
• April, Wall of Fame —  Great multi-user experience. A site with user-generated content which actually has it (the content). I voted for it in Peoples Choice Award.
• May, Pleasure Hunt — Another half game, half site. Entertaining way to present a brand.
• June, 3 Dreams of Black — WebGL experiment/interactive music video. Great demonstration of the technology.
• July, The Museum of Me — This is actually just a music video, not even interactive. But the idea behind it is brilliant.
• August, Sexy Fingers — This site doesn’t load on my machine, but I checked on a colleague’s PC and it looks like complete crap. Seems to be a bunch of sex-related games which are totally not work-safe.
• September, The Planet Zero — This one is awesome! The third half game, half site but uses pre-molehill software 3d rendering engine. ROXIK is the greatest!
• October, Being Henry — Really well-done interactive video.
• November, The Honda Experiment — Some kind of HTML “The Incredible Machines” game made with pop-up windows.
• December, Androp Bell — That’s just an awesome game. Great idea and really well-done.

Updated my good old FWA Winner from 2007. God, I can’t believe I wrote that code o.O !!1

While making screenshots of old flash sites for TheFWA new site I noticed that a lot of them fail to start because of wrong flash player detection. They tell me that I do not have Flash MX player. Of course damn it I don’t! Today is almost 2010 and flash player 10 rules the world. I decompiled one of flash detection SWFs and here we go:

if (getVersion().charAt(4) >= 6)

Do you see the problem here? All these SWFs think that I got flash player version 1 which is obviously too old to view the site.

Can you imagine that there were times without blogs? Nowadays everyone and their grandma has a blog (or 5 blogs like me). During 2000-2004 I’d been trying to invent blogs and failed. Yep, if you didn’t know I had one of the best inspiration blogsnews sites on the web at valyard.ru and valyard.com…

My main problem was that I tried to post news issues every day with new cool sites. There just wasn’t that many flash sites around. During that period I didn’t have much time and heavy flash sites required a lot of money to download on a modem connection. What’s more I didn’t have much feedback. As like nobody cared. But later I found out that they did care…

Several times during that period I had to stop posting and close the site. If only I got the concept of modern blogs… If only there was RSS widespread at that time… But blogs and RSS became popular only when I gave up and stopped posting at all.

I remember I saw TheFWA growing. I bet my site was at least as popular as Rob’s, but where is TheFWA and where’s me right now…

And now googling my nickname you still can find posts on other old blogs about me.

One of the coolest Flash blogs disappeared because of lack of feedback a while back – and is back now: valyard|ru
Lets try to keep Valyard inspired, the work he does is so good for showing the united creativity of the Flash community – we can’t afford to loose him again :-) February 22, 2003 on jdb

I’m happy to hear that valyard is back with a new site. As you might remember he has a great talent for finding those special sites that make your jaw drop. Welcome home! February 17, 2003 on Quasimondo

So, the site that went down to much dismay of the Flash community is coming back. The site used to sport many interesting sites, cool design sites, useful ones and entertaining ones. Valyard was down for quite sometime and it is making a come back soon, it says 2 days in its countdown. February 15, 2003 on Brajeshwar

I wish I could go back to year 2000…

And what’s about you, do you remember the old valyard|ru back then?

The recent FWA winner zeebee.co.uk is just great! I see a lot of coding there. Everything is so simple and smooth.