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The Million Dollar Homepage (2005)

milliondollarhomepage.com

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Re: The Million Dollar Homepage (2005)

#31

Post by gavd »

I was the developer who wrote the PHP that this site ran on. I knew Alex from Humanbeatbox.com - we were both beatboxers (known as A-Plus and BeatMuppet) who met at some jams. One night he rang me up saying that he had this site and it was getting a bit out of hand!

Initially he was managing the orders himself and manually updating the site, but as the media coverage grew and the traffic picked up, it was no longer manageable. I wrote a simple system to add, remove and move the pixels and helped with the orders.

Eventually, he had to take a couple of other people on to help with the orders - it really was a media storm as Alex was on TV and stuff!

It was a crazy few weeks but I'm very glad to have been a part of this!

Re: The Million Dollar Homepage (2005)

#36

Post by runn1ng »

kayoone wrote: post #24
mixmax wrote: post #15

An explanation for those who've never seen this before: A long long time ago on an Internet far from here a young man had an idea. His idea was simple but genius. He would make a homepage (as they were called back then) with a grid of 100 by 100 squares each ten pixels across. Each square could hold an image 10x10 pixels. One million pixels. Back when we didn't have retina displays and Stallmann was still young desig…

This was 2005, so its not that long ago, we already had facebook for example ;) Still the idea was pretty novel and worked, many tried to copy the approach and failed. Even Alex Tew, the guy behind the site, came back later with a Photobook and some other pixel based business idea (pixelotto) but couldnt replicate the success.

Facebook was a very different site back then. People still used MySpace. iPhone was still not introduced for 2 years. Apples computers were named iBook and PowerBook and run on PPC for one more year.

Re: The Million Dollar Homepage (2005)

#38

Post by wlj »

BuddhaSource wrote: post #19

Nostalgic! Btw how did it go viral back then? Curious. Was it cause of his story? Pay for tuition.

The mainstream media, particularly in the UK really picked up on this story at the time and I would say the 'pay for tuition' component played a big part in that.

There's an incomplete list of coverage he received on the site [1] but it doesn't include TV or radio, which was a fair amount too from memory.

[1] http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/press.php

Re: The Million Dollar Homepage (2005)

#40

Post by IlPeach »

gavd wrote: post #31

I was the developer who wrote the PHP that this site ran on. I knew Alex from Humanbeatbox.com - we were both beatboxers (known as A-Plus and BeatMuppet) who met at some jams. One night he rang me up saying that he had this site and it was getting a bit out of hand! Initially he was managing the orders himself and manually updating the site, but as the media coverage grew and the traffic picked up, it was no longer m…

do you know what happened after that? did it hold for long, or was it like a couple of months adventure? but mostly.... what about the money?
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