Show HN: WebTiles – create a tiny 250x250 website with neighbors around you
webtiles.kicya.net192 points by dimden 5 days ago
192 points by dimden 5 days ago
There is a large grid of 250x250 tiles, on which you are be able to create a tiny website, contained into the tile.
You can basically consider the tile as a mini version of your website, showcasing what your full site has (but it can be anything). You are able to link to your full site, and use any HTML/CSS/JS inside. The purpose is to create beautiful and interesting tiles, that could be used for exploring the indie-web in an easy and interesting way.
Reminds me a bit of http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com Old Internet times that will probably never come back. also reminds me of https://onemillionscreenshots.com (full disclosure - my screenshot api takes the screenshots :) ) 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 :) 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. Some of them even bought pixels on the original to advertise their knock-off. Predictably those are all long gone now. > Old Internet times that will probably never come back. 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. I know. But on the Internet everybody was talking about the One Million Dollar Home Page. I don't think WebTiles will be front page news tomorrow. 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. In this way it really beats milliondollarhomepage since most of that was just ads for the moneymakers of the day. Navigation seems fundamentally broken. I can zoom in and out, can't navigate left/right/up/down. Cursor keys don't work. sometimes as it works randomly Pianoverse shows up in one of the tiles. Clicking on the piano keys in the tile produced tones!!
Pianoverse is here, https://pianoverse.net/ Link to pianoverse.net tile, so satisfying to play with: https://webtiles.kicya.net/#875,125 I also created an interactive tile based on my vanilla-tilt.js library for my app: https://webtiles.kicya.net/#625,3875 This is really cool! How are you sandboxing the tiles and allowing limited JS execution? I'm using JS-Interpreter project: https://github.com/NeilFraser/JS-Interpreter . It's slow, but easy to add and work with. This is such a cool idea! The "corners of the internet" have felt increasingly opaque and cobwebby in this age of maximal indexing and centralization. Projects like this are a super cool way to recapture some of that old time magic. This immediately reminded of https://ourworldofpixels.com/ 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 wish the performance could be a little better. Maybe render stuff in chunks based off the position?
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