I bought a tiny piece of internet history. [Plus a little puzzle to keep you busy this weekend!]

Over a year ago I bought a domain name on a whim. Now you might be thinking "nothing special about that, I have done that!". In fact, some of you will probably have bought loads of domains on a whim!

But this domain is at least a little bit special as it is linked to quite a historic web page, one that is older than some of you reading this article (yikes, I am old!).

A little bit of history!

Back in 2005 Alex Tew wanted some money to pay for his University education.

He came up with the idea to sell pixels on a page for $1 each.

When you owned these pixels (bought in blocks of 10x10 pixels) you could upload an image that fits within those pixels.

In total there were 1000x1000 pixels up for grabs and...the rest is history. They all sold out!

The million dollar home page!

Yup, if you did the quick Maths (or knew of the site already) you will have worked out that 1000 x 1000 x $1 is $1,000,000!

If only I had thought of that idea!

Check it out in all of its glory!

The million dollar home page is still live and hopefully will be for a long time to come! You can read more about the million dollar homepage over on Wikipedia.

You can spend hours on there looking at all the little images, the random sites they lead to (and all of the dead ones!) etc.

Before you go to check it out though, I better get to the point...

So why is this relevant?

Oh yes, to the point!

When you bought these pixels you could link them to a domain name. So when you click on your pixel art it would redirect you to your domain name.

So I spent (far too long) clicking on every little image, seeing where it went to, checking for dead links and then seeing if the attached domain was up for sale.

By luck I found an awesome one at a reasonable price!

Now I could tell you what domain I bought...but that wouldn't be much fun. So here is a little puzzle for you!

The Puzzle!

Clue 1: "The key to unlocking this puzzle lies next to the ______".

The blank in the first clue is the missing word(s) from this famous movie quote...

Clue 2: "the matrix has you, follow the _______"

Not too difficult (I hope!).

Once you have worked out what you are looking for go to http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ and see if you can find out the answer to my riddle (it may take a while!)!

You will know if you have found the site as it will simply say "hello there my DEV friend" (yes, I really did make no effort to put anything else up there! It isn't even a valid HTML document...it's Friday, give me a break!).

First to find it can put the first letter of each full word in the domain name in the comments and claim your prize (which is nothing other than the satisfaction of winning I am afraid!).

That way other people can play along without you spoiling it!

Update!

Oh darn, I missed a big flaw in my plan as I didn't realise the image had a file name that matched in the HTML due to how the regions work! 🤦‍♂️

So now it is just down to how much fun you want to have exploring as it isn't much of a challenge if you use your developer skills!

You could open DevTools and search for the key word, or you can try and find it by eye and have a bit more fun!

If you have any funny (or good) ideas of what to do with the domain once you have found it then let me know as it has been sat doing nothing for over a year!

That is it!

I am still recovering after my monster last post so this is my "contribution" to the internet this week. (and the quotation marks are because I am not adding any value really 😋)

However I am working on an awesome series to do with building the ultimate blogging tool (an extension of some of the ideas in this post) so you may want to follow me if you write, or are considering writing (and you should write, it is awesome!)!

I love the fact that I own a little bit of this web page, it is a shame I can't change the image or the URL but still, a little bit of internet history that I will (hopefully) put to good use one day!

Have a great weekend peeps, I look forward to seeing if anyone finds the image and the domain name!