There's a theory running 'round the 'Net that somewhere, perhaps under a distant rainbow, lies a wealth of truly interesting and cool content. The rest of the web, the theory goes, is just a bunch of lists of links which connect to each other. And if you just found the right list of links, you could follow the rainbow to the end.
This theory first spawned Cool Site of the Day, which in turn passed on the legacy to hundreds of lists which fall under the general category of "adjective link of the time period." Well, we don't know if there truly is much gold at the end of the rainbow, but we're proud to note that CSotD and several other of these places tossed Tweak onto their burners.

On May 10, 1996, the Coolynx of the Day was kind enough to feature us. The following Sunday, May 12, the Catch of the Day reeled us in, and was fooled into thinking we were a "splendid looking WWW-zine that also has something most of them don't: interesting content."

Then, to our surprise, on May 13 we were named the Nudie Bar Link of the Day by some guy over in Sweden. And for the month of May, we made it to Coco Net's Off the Net page, who said we had "way ... too many gif animations, but some decent design and good content." Sorry guys, but when a new nifty techno-feature comes out, we just can't help ourselves. And finally, we took our place on the big daddy of web link lists, Yahoo, and were accidentally given the 'cool' sun glasses.

Coco Net's monthly list is licensed by Netscape, giving us the same listing on Netscape's Off the Net for May, and quite a while into June. Special thanks to Netscape for taking its sweet time to update the May Off the Net. Late in May, the people at Emap.com decided we were number nine in their Internet Top Ten countdown, though wiser heads prevailed later.

For June, the people at Exec-PC denoted Tweak as one of the Cool Sites of the Month, and on D-Day (June 6 to those of you who went truant during history class), we were the Windows Magazine Web HotSpot of the day. These are the people who brought you Windows Magazine, Netguide Magazine and Home PC Magazine.

Starting on June 28, the Microsoft Network selected our site as a Pick of the Day, adding some 200,000 hits over the weekend. They wisely called us "another one of those indescribably hip e-zines," and invited people to read Ben Gardella's On Being A Fan. We're not sure what indescribably hip means, but thanks anyway, MSN.

On July 8, USA Today's on-line version proclaimed us one of the Hot Sites of the Day. It may also have been published in the paper version, but the damn newspaper stand by the corner store was sold out by mid-afternoon. That same day we were reviewed by PRN Radio Network's Daily Report, and received the "Award of Excellence." PRN is an Internet radio station, where the intrepid surfer can listen to the show via VocalTec's IWave or TrueSpeech.

David Siegel, who lives and breathes site design, has been awarding High Five awards for a little over a year now, giving the coveted plaque once a week to sites with high quality design. On July 10, he rated Tweak and awarded us the High Five. He seemed to appreciate the Navbar, the layout of Phonetag and the use of background gifs in Muck. Tweak received a Degree of Difficulty of 3.9, an Execution rating of 4.0 and an Aesthetics rating of 3.8, all out of five.

On July 14, we overdosed on Coolium and, in the throws of the powerful chemical, we were denoted the Cool Site of the Day by the folks who started this craze, way back when the web was young, the sites were few, and people used paper money. On the same sunday, the folks over at the Seattle Times' Personal Technology section reviewed Tweak, giving us three and a half stars, somewhere between "Bookmark it" and "Tell a friend." They seemed to like our "geeky cheek" and the non-glitzy voyeurism of Firstperson. The reviewer was especially impressed with the "wonderful persona of Ridicholas Exaggeronte."
On July 18, the folks over at The McKinley Group (more commonly known as Magellan) designated Tweak as a "4-Star" site. The review kindly said "The writing is good, the serendipty of navigation is exceptional, and the future looks bright." Thanks - we're glad someone noticed we'd enlisted the aid of the Three Princes of Serendip in our navagation scheme.
Draw The Line's Websparks section seemed to think that "If there is such a thing as a buzz over a website, there certainly seems to be quite the buzz around town over Tweak," calling our 'zine the site of the week for July 29. The fine folks over there especially liked Ridicholas Exaggeronte.

Then on August 2 we we're charged with "providing a visually stimulating, thought-provoking, addictive site" and sent to jail. Web Jail, that is. On the advice of our attorney, we have pled Not Guilty and have no further comment at this time, pending plea bargaining negotiations.

By late August, we found that we were part of the Crème de la Crème, or, as we say in amerikanski, the Cream of the Cream.

Earlier that month, we were declared as a Project Cool Sighting by Glenn Davis & Teresa Martin. Glenn was one of the people at the original Cool Site of the Day, and went on to found Project Cool. Noting that "Many people enjoy displaying badges on their websites of the awards they have won," they were kind enough to provide us with this nifty badge.

On September 13, we became the Radioactive Site of the Day, which purports to highlight worthwhile sites on the World Wide Web. Later in September, we particpated in the Riddler's bloodhound game, and afterwords they mentioned that we were a "Riddler's Choice." They told us that "As a Riddler's Choice site, a link to your page will be featured on Riddler as one of the sites we consider the coolest on the Web."

Later in October, Lynn Ginsburg found Tweak fit for c|net's Best of the Web. Lynn especially liked Ridicholas Exaggeronte calling him "a sly and dead-on satire of a certain back-page columnist for a certain bible of the digerati." We, of course, don't know what she's talking about.





"World Wide Web Associates recognizes the year's best contributions to the Internet with [their] Top Ten awards, which indicate sites that are among the best in their category." There are a lot of categories, thus allowing for hundreds of Top Ten sites. But the good folks at WWWA sort through all the confusion and provide a Grand Prize of a trip to Hawaii to the best of the best. Seems that this year it went to Mapblast.com. Oh well, maybe next year.

The NetGuide Platinum Award "recognizes Web sites that meet [NetGuide's] stringent criteria for overall excellence." A mere 5,000 sites qualify for the Platinum level. While we're pleased, of course, for the recognition, the award set us thinking. If one were to surf fifty sites a day, one could go for over three months without hitting a single site that was less than Platinum! And people say that good sites are hard to find...

Though it did take our own hometown paper awhile to find us. Not that we're complaining, but it wasn't until July 23, 1997 — over a year after we launched — that the The Gate, the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, made us one of their ePicks. They claimed we exhibit "above-average writing, some very decent design work, and a nicely random intelligence." Also, we're "literate." So, um, thanks, guys. You have an above-average paper yourself.

Also taking awhile to find us, but making up for it by liking us a whole bunch, is Editor & Publisher Interactive, who named us their Web News Site of the Week for February 13, 1998. The review's so massive they're going to charge you two bucks to read it, but with turns of phrase like "Tweak's content is intelligently irreverent, interesting and informative at the same time and the design of the pages complements the content like a fine wine complements chateaubriand," it's two quid well spent.

This list is far from exhaustive. So we'd like to say thanks to all of these people for featuring our site, as well as the number of people who placed links to Tweak from their personal and professional pages. We hope we're worth the effort.