The Webtender - Cocktail & Mixed Drink Recipes and Bartending Guide

Here is a website that has been around for a very long time. Started in 1995 by Pål Løberg of Norway, The Webtender is an online database of mix drinks and cocktail recipes.

The site hosts more than 6000 drink recipes, a forum, a list of recommended books, an online bartender's handbook, and a large, categorized index of other websites having to do with drinking/bar culture. Something that caught my eye was a link to a Windows 95 drinking game where you take a drink when you see (X) while watching a Windows 95 infomercial. A bit dated, but still funny. Some of the links are also dated so you may have to plug them into the Wayback Machine to take a peek.

The site is written using HTML 3.2 and the database is coded by Løberg himself in C and Perl, according to the FAQ page. It is definitely Old Web having been around 30 years! He explains that the inspiration for the site came from a bartender program on an Amiga Computer. He started collecting recipes from various sources and compiled an online database just as most people outside of business and academia were getting online and discovering the web for the first time at home. He was compiling a large stash of information for anyone in the world to access because he wanted to make a useful web-service. He contributed 1500 recipes to the database, but the real contributors were visitors to the site. the rest of the database was filled out by visitors sending in recipes via a simple web form.

I'm not much of a drinker, but I appreciate this site. It is snappy and clean. The code is very clean and very hand coded. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't think this site was ever broke since it was coded. A very great and old example of a useful website at the right time for the right purpose. The spirit (lol) of the Old Web is very much embodied in this website.