MrBreakfast.com took one meal and treated it like an academic discipline with syrup on it.
The site says it has been serving breakfast since 2002. Today it contains more than 2,800 breakfast recipes, articles, product reviews, research pages, holiday material, international breakfast reports, and a huge cereal-history section.
The idea sounds like a joke until you start clicking.
There are separate indexes for pancakes, waffles, French toast, omelets, scrambles, baked goods, homemade cereals, regional breakfasts, experimental recipes, breakfast drinks, and dozens of other subdivisions.
Then there is the Cereal Project.
Somebody had to remember Gremlins Cereal
The Cereal Project officially launched in 2009 as an ongoing database of U.S. breakfast cereals. The current site lists more than 1,700 cereals, arranged by company, timeline, family, popularity, and other categories.
That turns cereal into something more interesting than a product list.
Packaging art, mascots, tie-ins, discontinued brands, promotions, and forgotten licensed cereals become a record of advertising and pop culture. A cereal connected to E.T. or Gremlins is also a tiny timestamp for what companies thought children would recognize in a particular year.
MrBreakfast also preserves an older kind of subject-site ambition. The navigation is large because the subject became large. There is no attempt to pretend every visitor wants the same path through it.
You can arrive looking for a pancake recipe and end up reading about cereal prizes from thirty years ago.
The site’s own press history shows it was already getting media attention in 2003, when Yahoo and television stations were selecting it as a notable web resource. That is a useful reminder that subject-specialist websites could become genuine reference destinations without needing to become giant media companies.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes old specialist sites because obsessive categorization is one of the best things the independent web ever produced.
MrBreakfast chose breakfast.
Then apparently refused to stop indexing it.