We had a lot of entries for our Fail contest; there can only be one winner though. We liked [Gordon LaPlante]‘s entry pictured above most of all. It’s big, it’s broken, and it’s black and white; that certainly sounds like us. [Gordon] wins $100 worth of No Starch Press merchandise.

There were plenty of other honorable entries. You can view them in the Hack a Day Flickr photo pool. We saw a couple themes emerge during the contest and have highlighted some of them after the break.

Hamsters

This caught us off guard. Our downtime message said, “we’re adding more hamsters to our server power plant” and people just ran away with it.

[hohan]

This one by [jetblackscreems] looks like it has lots of mascot potential, spelling be damned.

Fail Whales

These were natural given our Twitter inspiration.

[oneamericankid]

[Bjonnh]

[reenigneesrever]

[macetech] made probably the most Hack a Day appropriate rendition of the Twitter image.

Error screens

[jonathanrice78]

[AdamsGrizzly]

[dibbqwaz] made a fine ASCII 503 that should probably be in the previous category.

[adamsih300u]

Angry robots

We’re sad this didn’t gain more traction.

[enrique jimenez]

[einsofayin]

This was a really fun contest to hold and we’ll be having many more in the future. Check out our Hack a Day T-Shirt design contest, which ends this weekend.