
Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact - harel
http://www.lingscars.com/
======
dualogy
Aaaand it's down. lingscars.com will never understood why a scary DDoS from a
"Hacker site" hit them..

~~~
laumars
Sadly Lin is now blaming Hacker News for hacking her site with the intention
of taking it offline - which is just retarded as:

a) we're legitimate curious visitors (albeit not maybe not customers - but
who's to say that some of us wouldn't be converted from window shoppers to
buyers - that's kind of the point of websites after all) and

b) her webserver set up to only allow for 500 concurrent connections. Which is
just pathetic - particularly given the amount of crap she serves (and thus the
countless number of additional server connections each visitor makes to
download said content).

I used to think that her site was a mark of a genius; where she deliberately
made her site to look amateurish to push the site viral and thus give her huge
exposure that most other rentals could only dream of. But then I read her rage
tweets[1] and realised that she's just another idiot with an internet
connection. Needless to say I'm very disappointed - I liked Lin and her site
better when I thought it was designed ironically.

[1] [https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS](https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS)

~~~
mattmanser
To be fair, the trouble with a name like Hacker News is that the uninitiated
don't know it's for programmers and entrepreneurs.

And I never get people having a go about stuff like concurrent connections at
amateurs, that's _completely_ our fault.

Why can't web servers stop acting like babies that need constant attention
with some sort of mystical knowledge to stop them falling over when something
new happens? Why is our software so brittle?

~~~
laumars
Because hardware varies significantly. What's optimal on some systems is sub-
par on others. Thus it takes a sysadmin to set up the server optimally.

Also, most web farms these days are built with multiple nodes that serve ~500
concurrent requests (even multiple VMs performs better than one instance of
Linux on the same hardware running bare metal) and load distributed across
each node. So a 500 concurrent default is entirely reasonable.

However all of the above is moot because she's running Apache on Debian -
which does _not_ default to 500 concurrent connections. That is a setting
she's applied herself (or paid someone to set up).

And for the record, I'm all for amateurs rolling their own web servers - I'm
certainly not elitist in that regard. But the fact remains that some of this
stuff is rather technical, so complaining that it isn't easy is like saying
cars should be self-servicing and that we shouldn't need garages and
engineers.

~~~
vidarh
But a lot of these limits could default to automatically adjust. Serving much
more than 500 concurrent requests for static content is rather trivial on most
remotely modern hardware if the software is designed for it.

And reasonable queuing behaviour for sites have been possible for well over a
decade. E.g. Eddie is 14 years old
([http://eddie.sourceforge.net/txt/WP_1.0.html](http://eddie.sourceforge.net/txt/WP_1.0.html)
\- see the "Quality of Service" section in particular - while Eddie is
intended for clustered setups, there are many situations where this approach
is amenable even to single server setups) and provides a solution (amongst
others) where if the system can't handle the incoming traffic, rather than
serving up the main page and choking on assets and failing miserably in
serving up anything to anyone, you can serve up a small light "queue" page and
grant access to the full site as and when capacity allows.

There are certainly plenty of things that truly does require a lot of
technical skill to sort out, but a lot of software have poor defaults and
lacks relatively straightforward features that would make the out of the box
experience tremendously much better for less technical users.

~~~
laumars
_> But a lot of these limits could default to automatically adjust._

No. I do not want my server hardware attempting to guess optimal performance.
I'd rather do that myself and know that it's set up correctly.

You wouldn't buy a sports car then moan that it's a manual gear box and lacks
cruise control. Just as you wouldn't run an automated tool to master a studio
recording before sending the master off for CD pressing. If people want
guesswork then don't install professional tools (sane defaults are another
issue though - I just object to pro-tools applying guesswork).

 _> And reasonable queuing behaviour for sites have been possible for well
over a decade._

Apache does queue TCP/IP connection requests. "Sorry pages" should be
configured on the load balancer rather than HTTP daemon as the whole point of
them is to offload the work from the saturated nodes.

 _> There are certainly plenty of things that truly does require a lot of
technical skill to sort out, but a lot of software have poor defaults and
lacks relatively straightforward features that would make the out of the box
experience tremendously much better for less technical users._

A lot of software does have crap defaults, like how Apache publishes it's
version number and the underlying OS by default (the _ServerTokens_
directive). However the examples given (concurrent connections and sorry
pages) are not wrong (her concurrent connections is set to a non-default value
and sorry pages don't belong on the HTTP daemon because they're supposed to
bypass the load)

~~~
dllthomas
_" No. I do not want my server hardware attempting to guess optimal
performance. I'd rather do that myself and know that it's set up correctly."_

Parent said " _default_ to automatically adjust" \- and I see no reason it
shouldn't. You could still manually tweak all you want.

~~~
laumars
The automatic adjust option would be a crap default though. Just the process
of Apache checking whether a page is static or dynamic means accepting the
connection to begin with - by which point it would be too late to forward the
connection to a sorry page if content is dynamic. It would also mean that
connections end up stacking at a far greater rate as Apache is required to
open each and every request just to identify teh requested file. The whole
process would just break servers that are already under heavy load and serves
no purpose what-so-ever on servers that aren't stressed. And since this whole
argument is about how software should ship sane defaults, Apache is definitely
doing the right thing by not including such nonsense by default.

Believe me when I say that I'd welcome such a routine if it was practical as
it would save me weeks of my life from load testing and fine tuning. But it
just wouldn't work in practice.

~~~
dllthomas
Automatic dynamic tuning isn't an obvious choice[1], and isn't what I was
suggesting, and I doubt it was what the parent great-grandparent was
suggesting. I simply meant scaling parameters based on the hardware available
and whatever else can be determined easily at configuration time.

[1] Not going to come out and say it _couldn 't_ work, but I am skeptical for
a good many reasons, some of which you've touched on.

~~~
laumars
Ahh yes. That could work. In fact I've often wondered why Apache didn't
attempt a little of that (even just on the most rudimentary level; setting the
concurrency of processes based on the number of CPU cores reported. But it
wouldn't be hard to add a little more intelligence)

If that was what the parent comments referred to though, then it's still a
moot point as Lin was isn't running the default tunings (if her 500 concurrent
figure is to be believed), so the issue still falls back on her rather than
Apache defaults (which is what this argument started over). Though I guess you
could also argue that if Apache did some level of auto-tuning then Lin may not
have felt obliged to tamper with the defaults.

------
scrapcode
[http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/](http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/) \-
Survived the tests of time. I hear it still converts ;]

~~~
kfk
First time I saw this I thought: "uhm, what a nice scammy little site..."

~~~
nicholassmith
Especially with the cheap car insurance promo.

~~~
kfk
Did you actually read the message from Buffet to convince people to buy
jewelry?

\-->
[http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/message.html](http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/message.html)

 _Fine jewelry, watches and giftware will almost certainly cost you less at
Borsheim 's. I've looked at the figures for all publicly-owned jewelry
companies and the contrast with Borsheim's is startling. Our one-store
operation, with its huge volume, enables us to operate with costs that are
fully 15-20 percentage points below those incurred by our competitors. We pass
the benefits of this low-cost structure along to our customers. _

------
MartinMcGirk
It's not just the small players that preserve such excellent retro-design
insight. May I introduce the HBO Corporate website:

[http://www.homeboxoffice.com/](http://www.homeboxoffice.com/)

~~~
drivers99
Wow that is a lot like a site I would have made in 1997. (I'm not a web
designer, but back then sometimes there was no one else to do it.)

Except that Donald Norman would say that putting directions like "PLEASE NOTE:
For GUIDE SERVICES, MEDIA RELATIONS and access to other HBO EXTRANET sites,
use the links on the left." means that your user interface is not self-
explanatory and should be fixed.

------
jdmitch
The best part is her cookie disclaimer:

"EU cookie law. Piss off Von Rumpy. Me... I hammer visitors to death with
cookies, so I can find out what they want. Cookies allow my website to serve
visitors the content they need. Get used to it. The EU cookie law is an ass. -
Ling"

------
sp8
I present you [http://www.fabricland.co.uk/](http://www.fabricland.co.uk/) \-
real shop (with a branch near me) and actually a pretty good place, just with
a hideous (and genuine, as far as I can tell) web site.

~~~
retube
A quick glance seems to indicate they break every rule of modern web design.
It's almost too perfect. Like the spec was to to do the exact oposite of what
you're supposed to....

~~~
ZirconCode
It's titled "New Page 1". It's just so perfect.

~~~
mAritz
The title of the mainframe page is "Fabricland fabric shops throughout South
of England and mail order service". So, that's good and informative.

------
beeneto
I can't link to it now because the site is down, but lingscars has a PDF of
'web design tips' where she explains the design and gives tips on website
design. She's obviously got an eccentric public image, and the design tips
document is a bit of a joke, but the design here was a deliberate choice to
differentiate the site from competitors, make potential customers feel less
intimidated and more socially involved. There was even a webcam of the office
with a button which apparently played a song in the office when you pressed
it.

The business is also doing very well.

------
anonymoushn
I really enjoyed the cookie ticker. Here are its full contents:
[http://pastie.org/8034213](http://pastie.org/8034213)

Unfortunately, the site seems to have detected me mucking about (perhaps
because I deleted the element containing the annoying flash video?) and
redirected me to /_donotsteal.html (which itself was a redirect to
/_donotsteal.html) for a while. Now it just serves me a 1-byte file for any
URL, except for /_donotsteal.html, which is 4 bytes.

~~~
laumars
Christ on a bike, there's a lot of weird stuff in there:

    
    
        cookie:sexual_orientation=female; - watches how often visitors make irrational decision changes and identifies those people who are schizophrenic as: FEMALE.
    
        cookie:favourite_biscuit=garibaldi; - can detect missed key-strokes caused by crumbs jamming the user keyboard. Compares results over a long period of time to determine typical biscuit type.
    
        cookie:favourite_animal_noise=BAAAAA; - monitors any accidentally open audio channels, to determine if the user snorts or chuckles while browsing and then compares the wavelength of the noise with a table of animal sounds.

------
harel
Here's Ling's LinkedIn:
[https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?authToken=qSpd&id=3543...](https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?authToken=qSpd&id=35433059&trk=prof-
sb-browse_map-name&authType=name)

I think there's some sort of genius in there. Its somewhat like playing the
piano and faking playing the wrong notes intentionally - its a lot harder to
fake playing badly than it is to actually play bad (if that makes sense)

~~~
marquis
Does she have a public profile? The link you provided requires auth. I think
she's fascinating and inspiring.

~~~
harel
[http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/ling-
valentine/b/a49/2ab](http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/ling-valentine/b/a49/2ab)

------
barbs
MSY, a popular computer parts store in Australia, has always had a pretty
dodgy-looking website.

[http://msy.com.au/](http://msy.com.au/)

~~~
C1D
They're probably the most popular PC parts store in Australia (I've bought
from them), yet it looks like they couldn't afford to upgrade their site
template they created in 1997.

~~~
robryan
Last time I went in there I was impressed that they had now invested in a few
tables around their counter area.

------
johnohara
I go to a large indoor swap meet/flea market near here to check out used
computer equipment, tools and other stuff. The aisles are crowded, stuff hangs
everywhere, lights are flashing, sounds collide, sellers project offers to you
from behind makeshift counters, and you move through it slowly to make sure
you don't miss anything.

This site gives me the same feeling -- raw selling.

Edit: respectfully fixed a typo.

------
simonbarker87
I loooove Lings Cars - her "nuclear missile" is parked just round the corner
from my house

Watch her on here on dragons den to understand the nuclear missile quip

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc1ktZRZ5ZM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc1ktZRZ5ZM)

------
timmillwood
A must watch - [http://www.besquare.me/session/the-future-of-digital-
marketi...](http://www.besquare.me/session/the-future-of-digital-marketing/)

~~~
robmclarty
Ling's got some solid points to make. For example, the silly things she does
on her site builds trust with her customers because her customers get more of
a glimpse into her personality compared to other dealerships. Trust converts
more than pretty, or sensible, visual design.

It's taking branding in a different direction than what we normally consider
and I think it's worth while to think outside the box most of us put ourselves
in when considering how to maximize conversions. I don't know if what Ling's
doing is optimal, but it definitely sheds light on other approaches that are
sometimes ignored.

------
vidarh
This is one of my favorites:
[http://www.arngren.net/](http://www.arngren.net/)

Arngren started out as an electronics and hobby type store in Oslo, and a
catalog, and their website looks pretty much the way their massive catalogue
used to look like 20+ years ago, when it had toys and household stuff in
between pages of IC's with pinouts.

On one hand the website is horrible. On the other hand, it perfectly captures
the brand...

------
bradshaw1965
The direct response industry continues to use long sales letters and "ugly"
design to great effect. It's the same kind of a/b testing that agile UX
practitioners espouse that produced "Red gets read!" lore in direct marketing.
Still gives me the heabie jeabies looking at that stuff though.

~~~
swethrowaway
Is there a good beginner's guide to learning about that sort of thing? I'll
use whatever works, even arcane and ugly landing pages.

~~~
harel
The best way to learn is to measure. Try one type of ad, measure response and
reach, adjust, measure again. Rinse and repeat until you see what works and
what doesn't.

------
ancarda
Close, but it still doesn't beat Yvettes' [1]

[1]
[http://websitesfromhell.net/view/yvettesbridalformal.com-10/](http://websitesfromhell.net/view/yvettesbridalformal.com-10/)
(Site is no longer up).

~~~
oyvindeh
This is a Norwegian classic: [http://arngren.net/](http://arngren.net/)

------
kephra
w-hat are they doing wrong?

[http://www.lingscars.com/](http://www.lingscars.com/) redirects to
[http://www.lingscars.com/_donotsteal.html](http://www.lingscars.com/_donotsteal.html)

Firefox (NoScript) shows:

The page isn't redirecting properly

Iceweasel has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this
address in a way that will never complete.

This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept
cookies.

Lynx shows:

lynx [http://www.lingscars.com/](http://www.lingscars.com/)

Looking up www.lingscars.com Making HTTP connection to www.lingscars.com
Sending HTTP request. HTTP request sent; waiting for response. HTTP/1.1 302
Found Data transfer complete HTTP/1.1 302 Found Using
[http://www.lingscars.com/_donotsteal.html](http://www.lingscars.com/_donotsteal.html)
Looking up www.lingscars.com Making HTTP connection to www.lingscars.com
Sending HTTP request. HTTP request sent; waiting for response. HTTP/1.1 302
Found Data transfer complete HTTP/1.1 302 Found

lynx: Start file could not be found or is not text/html or text/plain
Exiting...

~~~
Hello71
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.li...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.lingscars.com)

~~~
kephra
webcache - so this site worked - and went down by a Hacker News DDoS of only
31 points (3100 visitors) in 56 minutes.

/me sings
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0WxgSXdEE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0WxgSXdEE)

------
sambeau
<BLINK>THERE ARE PLENTY MORE TO FIND HERE</BLINK>

[http://www.iamsad.co.uk/](http://www.iamsad.co.uk/)

------
jwecker
Brilliant. From the live office webcams page (where you have the option to
taunt specific employees):

"Are those traffic lights real? Yes! There is another set of traffic lights,
hidden to the left of the camera, too! They keep my staff awake with visual
stimulation in the same way that my website invigorates my visitors!"

The office looks just like the website.

------
nnq
The tutorial for using the website is awesome (and beautifully anti-american):
[http://www.lingscars.com/chat.php?domain=www.lingscars.com&l...](http://www.lingscars.com/chat.php?domain=www.lingscars.com&lang=en&operator=Ling%20V)

------
glennos
Similar colour scheme to iOS7.

------
quchen
The classical text only version of a website in case your bandwidth is
limited: [http://www.timecube.com/](http://www.timecube.com/)

------
C1D
It seems the site is redirecting to
[http://www.lingscars.com/_donotsteal.html](http://www.lingscars.com/_donotsteal.html)
for me?

~~~
hmottestad
+1

Maybe it is because of my ad-blocker?

------
97-109-107
[http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/](http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/)
\- will bring hours of enjoyment then

------
dave_sid
It's a pretty funny, retro looking site but as far as I can tell she does
pretty well out of it. She might not be an artist but she's great at marketing
in her own way.

------
janus
This one is awesome
[http://www.wingsandwheels.com/wantads1.htm](http://www.wingsandwheels.com/wantads1.htm)

------
snappieT
See also: [http://www.powercity.ie/](http://www.powercity.ie/)

------
alexvr
Yeah. Flat designs are boring -- I never end up on the floor, convulsing, when
I scroll through a flat website.

------
ap2002
Take a look at the sauce - Ling definitely knows what's up! Epic ASCII art
right there!

~~~
zaf
Yeah, I saw that to.

Tried finding clues who does the website but no luck after first scan.

~~~
dan1234
I'm not sure who handles it now, but Jamie Hurst[1] handled it up until quite
recently.

[1][http://uk.linkedin.com/in/jamiehurst88](http://uk.linkedin.com/in/jamiehurst88)

------
loceng
Go big or go home. I like it.

------
swethrowaway
Someone should create a LingsCars inspired theme for Bootstrap or whatever :)

------
jacquesm
She's got a deLorean for sale, that makes up for a lot.

edit: gender corrected, tx.

~~~
harel
Aha! Below the deLorean is this statement: "This is clearly a joke listing.
This car ceased to be made in 1982. For the ASA benefit - this is a j-o-k-e"

~~~
jacquesm
Spoiler.

------
imohnish
This made my day.

