By now, everyone is familliar with The Million Dollar Homepage. Alex reached his goal and ended up making, as far as I can tell, a little over a million dollars on the endeavor.
When I first heard about the page, I knew he would get his million — it was just one of those ideas that works phenomenonally on the internet and no where else. So I began taking screen shots (every day or so) with the vague intention of creating some kind of time-lapse animation of the page in the future. I figured that once the animation were complete, it’d end up as a manifestation of a kind of micro-internet expansionism and perhaps, with the help of the GIF animation format, we’d be able to draw some conclusions about internet, advertising, and social progress. Actually, I just really like time-lapse animation and figured this would be a good experiment in timelapsedigitalography.
So here are some technical issues regarding the GIF and this experiment:
- I didn’t take shots every day — sometimes I’d go a week without doing it, so the animation is not uniform. You want your one-frame-a-day animated gif version of the Million Dollar Homepage? Get a time machine.
- Some of the background drops in and out out because I didn’t always grab the image in the same way, and some frames ended up with unintentionall transparencies.
- The gif is a little over 8.5mb with a Web-palette of 256.
- There are 35 frames (hence the name… 35 x 1 million = 35 million pixels… this isn’t a serious calculation, GIF probably resuses plenty of pixels so its probably more like 2-3 million actual unique pixels).
- I retain no copyright over this image and don’t care what you do with it, as long as you give me credit if you repost it.
- Yes, there are probably better ways of doing this — I did it as a fun experiment over a couple of months. There are plenty of other sites that you can work on.
This will *probably* crash your browser, but click on the following thumbnail:
