There was a stretch of time — call it the late 90s through the mid-2000s — when the internet felt like a place you could actually get lost in. Not the way you get lost now, where an algorithm decides what's next and you emerge forty minutes later having learned approximately nothing. Actually lost. Accidentally, interestingly, stumbled-into-something-you-didn't-expect lost.
Homestar Runner was the clearest example of this. You'd go there for a Strong Bad email and leave hours later having found a secret page you'd clicked into by accident, or an easter egg buried in the credits of a cartoon, or a hidden game that only appeared if you moused over exactly the right spot. The brothers who made it packed every corner of that site with things that rewarded the people actually paying attention. You could feel the personality behind it — their specific humor, their in-jokes, their willingness to put real effort into something most visitors would never see.
Newgrounds was rougher and weirder and somehow more electric. Flash games and animations made by people with specific ideas and no one telling them what those ideas should be. eBaum's World, Albino Black Sheep, Something Awful — places where you didn't know what you'd find, but you knew it would be something. Surprise wasn't a bug to be engineered away. It was the point.
That era produced a feeling I've been trying to name for a while. The feeling of discovering something that wasn't designed to be found easily. Something that existed because someone wanted to make it, not because it would perform well against a benchmark. That mode of interaction — stumbling, exploring, being caught genuinely off guard — has been almost entirely optimized out of the modern web.
I wanted to put some of it back.
What This Site Now Has
FloppyCougar has easter eggs. It has a puzzle hunt. I'm not going to tell you what they are, where they are, or what finding them actually involves. That's not coyness for its own sake — the not-telling is the whole design. If I explained them, they wouldn't be eggs. They'd be an FAQ.
What I will say is that building hidden things inside a website is a completely different design problem than building the visible parts. The visible parts have clear jobs: communicate clearly, load fast, look intentional. Hidden things have a different job. They have to justify the search. They have to be worth finding — not just a text file that says "you found it," but something that makes you glad you looked.
That constraint forces you to think about discovery differently. What does it feel like to stumble into something unexpected? What makes a secret worth keeping? When is the payoff proportional to the effort, and when does it just become obscure for its own sake? These are design questions the normal web almost never asks — and it turns out they're interesting ones.
What the Web Can Actually Do
The mainstream web in 2026 is very good at a narrow set of things. It's good at getting clicks. It's good at surface-area optimization. It's exceptionally good at ensuring the next piece of content is always one scroll away.
It is not good at surprise. It's nearly allergic to delight. It has mostly forgotten that a web page can do something unexpected that has nothing to do with conversion rates.
This is partly structural — weird, surprising things don't scale and don't map onto KPIs. But it's also a failure of imagination about what the medium can actually do. Browsers can do remarkable things. CSS can do remarkable things. The intersection of what a browser can render and what a visitor will not expect is much wider than most websites bother to explore.
I'm building one website. I can afford to be weird about it.
The easter eggs and puzzle hunt are an exploration of that space — of what's possible when you're not optimizing for anything a dashboard measures. Some of what I found there is technically interesting. Some of it is just fun. Most of it turned out to be both, which is the best outcome.
On the Puzzle Hunt Specifically
An easter egg is passive in a certain way — you find it or you don't. A puzzle hunt is different. It assumes an active participant, someone whose goal is looking. There's a path, and a start, and something at the end of it. Building that means designing for a mode of engagement the web has almost entirely abandoned: the visitor as participant, not consumer.
That kind of interaction is what the best early sites had. Homestar Runner wasn't a document you consumed; it was a world you moved around in. Figuring out how to build a small version of that — inside a static HTML site, no less — turned out to be one of the more interesting design problems I've worked on. Whether it lands is something only the people who find their way through it will know.
Why Mention It at All
Most professional websites don't have hidden things in them, and they probably shouldn't. Clean communication is right for most purposes.
But FloppyCougar is also trying to demonstrate something about how I think. And part of how I think is: you make the thing work, then you make it interesting, then — if you have time and a bit of restlessness — you hide something in it for the people paying close attention.
The web used to reward that kind of attention. I'm trying to do my small part to bring that back.