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.

We’re back! There may be a bit of oddness for the next few days. Our Fail Whale contest is still running and we’ve received over 100 entries so far. Here’s how you can participate:

While we’re adding more hamsters to our server power plant we thought we’d hold a little art contest. Whenever Twitter goes down, they post the iconic Fail Whale. The Fail Whale has become so popular that it has spawned a dedicated blog and many many art projects: embroidery, tattoos, and laser cut models.

We want to see what you think Hack a Day failure looks like. Create an illustration, photo, sculpture, anything that you think embodies Hack a Day failing. Send your entries to hackaday.fail@gmail.com and add them to the Hack a Day photo pool. The prize is $100 for you to spend in the No Starch Press store. Entries are due 00:00PDT Saturday September 6th 2008.

[image: Bjonnh]