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An Internet Canvas (mmm.dev)
167 points by antidnan on July 27, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 48 comments


Creator of mmm.page here — thanks all for the attention. I woke up wondering why traffic suddenly spiked...

I recently created a newsletter [1] to write and experiment more a la "An Internet Canvas." Feel free to give it a read.

You can also find me on Twitter [2], and support my project via patronships [3].

Oh, and go explore all the other sites people have made [4].

[1] https://woolgather.sh/issue/1

[2] https://twitter.com/xhfloz

[3] https://woolgather.sh/patron

[4] https://explore.mmm.page


This is cool af. Almost feels like TOO many options for me but I'm an old who remembers editing MySpace pages. I love that this is a thing, it brings that MySpace-coding feeling back...the feeling that anything is possible and you're only limited by your imagination.

I love that this product is responsive too. The creator(s) could've easily ignored mobile and kept it moving. Current website builders are serious about business whereas this one makes no assumptions and is quite fun.


Totally agree! I love mmm.page and I do think the internet needs more spaces for people to create their own pages and express their creativity. I actually recreated MySpace a while back[0] and and I'm seeing that a lot more people think this way!

[0] https://spacehey.com


This sorta kinda feels like Multiverse [0], a project which has been on a sort of break [1] so it seems there is much room for innovation in this space!

[0] https://multiverse.plus

[1] https://multiverse.plus/kicks/unfulfilling-message-1


Multiverse looks great too, wow!!


This is very cool .... so polished, love the sound effects!

Any plans to open source the editing tools part of this? (separate from the web page building part of it). Seems great for annotating/collaborating on existing web pages.


This is seriously awesome. I'm having a ton of fun slapping together a page.

One piece of feedback - you have got to make it so drawings auto-save instead of disappearing when you click exit instead of save. This is something that both me and my son have encountered in just the 20 minutes we've been playing with it. It's such a bummer to see your lovingly mouse-drawn art disappear into nothingness because you hit the wrong button.


Ohh. I misread this. I thought you meant auto-save the editor. Now my response seems glib. Absolutely -- I should at least warn people when they try to exit the drawing view.


That is on the roadmap :)


A couple of small points of feedback after using it for a few minutes:

* The move to front/back hotkey tooltips are both listed as ].

* There doesn't seem to be a way to add a link to words/text within a text box, only the text box itself. This is quite different from how most people expect links to work on web pages.

* Speaking of links, if you have an image with transparent pixels in front of another image (such as the HyperCard screenshot) and you add a link to the image in back, the link is not clickable. It makes sense why, but it's a bit counterintuitive (and also limits the usefulness of images with transparency).


* Those hotkeys should work (follows Figma's example). * A very high priority. * Yeah... I plan to let people disable click (e.g. pointer-events: none) on elements, but automatically detecting transparent overlapping areas is a bit more work.


I had an epiphany recently that as the tooling for WASM matures, we'll likely return to a visual programming model. I know Microsoft has doubled down on this front (https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...) but I'm ideally this is still a universe of HTML/JS/CSS that's easy to pick apart under the surface.

This Internet Canvas seems like a step in that direction.


I LOVE this! Very excited to play around with it. This all makes so much sense and I really like the point about not assuming what the framework/builder is for. Brilliant!


I love this idea. And maybe this criticism is unavoidable in today's world, but I had conflicting emotions on the matter.

One side of me thought, "oh man they know their target. Animated gifs and websites that just want to share rather than worry about fancy schmancy Silicon Valley nonsense design.

But then the other side of me detected the typical 2020s startup pattern of "landing page where you can't do anything but sign up or read a "compelling" story that should make you feel feels."

Gimme that nostalgia. Gimme my page! Gimme gimme! Let me start screwing around IMMEDIATELY and let me save it to my disk or offer to host it for me if I make an account.

EDIT: I just found the Edit button in the corner that gives me almost exactly what I want. Ohhh sound effects! This is snappy! That Edit button should be front and center... or even just on by default. Also I LOVE "Not visible on phones" as a very simple solution. Sure it's limiting, but I think it's far more accessible than "oh there's multiple views and you have to worry all about responsiveness." Nope... just... "this is bonus space for desktops." Maybe I'll hide some easter eggs there.

EDIT2: my last criticism is that you should be up front about the pricing model without me first having to make an account. The model seems reasonable, but it's yet another "2020s era pattern to capture you before telling you the details." I hate making accounts only to find out later that the pricing is silly. Makes me feel like I'm just a pawn to some SV startup garbage.


To be fair, the pricing is easily locatable in the hamburger menu, without the need to log in


Ah I missed that!!


I took a look at some of the pages the users made and it gave me a flashback from the 90's/00's when we had c2u it was very popular in the Netherlands. Basically you could just create a page in pure HTML (I don't even think it had proper validation) and people shared/stole snippets they liked. One big blur of colour. Still love the creativity of people.


Currently working on the ability to copy and paste the underlying blocks into your own editor (with owner’s permission) —- big believer in popping the hood!

Long term dream is to have the HTML output look good enough that people can edit at both WYSIWYG and code levels.


I think you mean CU2 :-)


It has become a dating site! How awful...


I really like mmm.page! It's so much fun to build a webpage with it, and it's extremely easy to use.

Unfortunately, the ease of use has a limitation: on mobile, only the center column of the page is visible. This makes it unsuitable for a portfolio site with large landscape images.

Would this use case require another site such as EEE.page, or will mmm.page evolve into a more complex system?


It seems to be a known issue/limitation, as the editor has the sides labeled "not visible on phones".


If you turn on the experimental features you can edit the mobile viewport to be wider


I clicked the "Code" button and it says "requires an upgrade to Plus." That made me sad. Also, I couldn't figure out how to rotate stuff... one of the images was rotated but I can't find the tool for it. That's actually what made me click "code".

I know this isn't supposed to be a finished product.


To rotate, select an object and move the mouse to just outside one of the corner/anchor boundaries - the cursor will change to a curved arrow which will rotate the shape


Oh, thanks, it works! I didn't think to try that. I'm used to UIs where you click a second time to go into rotate mode.


That is not an unfair assessment. Hopefully 1.0 irons out the kinks.


Looks almost exactly the same as e.gg, which Meta shut down after a few months.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/18/facebook-launches-e-gg-an-...


I've been using mmm.page to manage a tiny landing page for awhile, I really like its flexibility and ease of use.

It is something I would definitely look into paying for in the future if the site needs to grow into something bigger, or for other projects I want to do.


Wow! This looks so fun and definitely reminds me of when people were less about their "personal brand" with their websites. It feels less intimidating and serious. I loved looking at the random pages.


Super cool! I built a similar tool a few years back but never followed through on making it open to the public. Love seeing that I'm not the only one who yearns for more fun page editing tools.

Keep up the great work!


mmm is the best My kids (9yo) love it too One of them made this https://masalagames.mmm.page/shaan



Shaan is rocking a cool website.


It doesn't seem to load/work on Firefox 115.0.2 (Mac OS) for me.


love this. are there any open source versions of this as a library?


It seems cool, but viewing it with mobile chrome, a lot of stuff is misaligned with images on top of text and some text on top of other text. In mobile firefox it looks great.


Mobile Chrome on what OS?


Impressive but quite sluggish and slow


It's pretty fast on my Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 GB of RAM and running Firefox.


Its quite responsive on my end, admittedly i'm only running it on a i7-8665U with 8gb of ram, not some shiny apple M* cpu.


I am running on a i9 16gb ram pc but struggles moving images. Still love the idea, though.


What's your device spec? I have November blocked out for optimizations.


Kinda seems to lock you into the ecosystem. Is there an option to export the data somehow?


this is sooo cute! I don't have a use for it right now, but I had a lot of fun editing the website


[flagged]


I got an (automated?) email from HN mods to repost it on the HN second chance pool https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308


TIL


No traction, no dupe :) As long as op doesn't spam it.




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