I'm immediately amazed at how many neat 'small web' sites, seemingly made with love by nice human people, have claimed tiles already. Browsing around the tiles that look interesting feels like peeking through a time portal at 2001, in the very best way.<p>In this way it really beats milliondollarhomepage since most of that was just ads for the moneymakers of the day.
Reminds me a bit of <a href="http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com</a><p>Old Internet times that will probably never come back.
I wonder how much of that would be left standing today if you blanked out all the dead/squatted links...
I owned a nice little parcel, but my registrar had issues with a payment and the email got swallowed up and I didn't notice. Forgot to check up on it because I paid for several years up front at a time. Oh well :)
The Alaska Mint is the only link I clicked that still worked
I read somewhere that after it took off, people started making copycat sites -- which inevitably sold about 6 pixels each. I sometimes wonder if those copycat site people were surprised that their sites didn't do as well, when their pixels were just as good.
Considering that one of the common critiques of Bitcoin is "Why should it have value when anyone can make one?" It seems quite a lot of people don't grasp that when people have a choice of interaction mechanism, there is value in going where the people already are.<p>I guess the counterpoint to that, for both Crypto and Pixel sites, is that the cost of making one is low enough that someone could do it not expecting it to do well and is just taking a punt on the non-zero chance it will do well.<p>For the rest of us, we are probably better off ignoring the many insignificant instances. They are, for the most part truly insignificant. You may stumble across one once in a while, but really you would have to go looking specifically for them to be annoyed by how many there are.
Some of them even bought pixels on the original to advertise their knock-off. Predictably those are all long gone now.
Sounds like a great predictive metaphor for the cryptocurrency industry.
> Old Internet times that will probably never come back.<p>I don't understand. How can you say this on a post about a site that is almost the exact same thing you're reminiscing about? Arguably way cooler - at least WebTiles isn't charging money for spots.
also reminds me of <a href="https://onemillionscreenshots.com" rel="nofollow">https://onemillionscreenshots.com</a><p>(full disclosure - my screenshot api takes the screenshots :) )
I find it a bit sad of many of these websites are just no longer available
Pianoverse shows up in one of the tiles. Clicking on the piano keys in the tile produced tones!!
Pianoverse is here, <a href="https://pianoverse.net/" rel="nofollow">https://pianoverse.net/</a>
Link to pianoverse.net tile, so satisfying to play with: <a href="https://webtiles.kicya.net/#875,125" rel="nofollow">https://webtiles.kicya.net/#875,125</a><p>I also created an interactive tile based on my vanilla-tilt.js library for my app: <a href="https://webtiles.kicya.net/#625,3875" rel="nofollow">https://webtiles.kicya.net/#625,3875</a>
This is really cool! How are you sandboxing the tiles and allowing limited JS execution?
This is such a cool idea!<p>The "corners of the internet" have felt increasingly opaque and cobwebby in this age of maximal indexing and centralization.<p>Projects like this are a super cool way to recapture some of that old time magic.
Heads up: I clicked a tile and got the hamsterdance music pretty loud in my ears. Serves me right for being distracted during a meeting but still, sound warning :)
Navigation seems fundamentally broken. I can zoom in and out<i>, can't navigate left/right/up/down. Cursor keys don't work.<p></i>sometimes as it works randomly
This immediately reminded of <a href="https://ourworldofpixels.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldofpixels.com/</a>
I'm actually an admin of that site, and I learned JavaScript by creating scripts for it (which eventually led me to becoming admin there).
I accidentally painted a line through some pixel art on mobile. Sorry!
there are so many cool sites out there. how am i just finding this gem now?
I wish the performance could be a little better. Maybe render stuff in chunks based off the position?
This is very fun. Great idea and execution.
this is lovely, thank you for sharing!
are you letting the internet vomit all over your server? impressed it has stayed as neat as it has.
How do you prevent DoS attacks?
Neat idea!
cool idea!
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How does it differ from hundreds of other ideas and websites like this?