Questions & answers

If you are just looking

What am I looking at?

One picture, woven out of websites. Every site on the board occupies a square block of cells, and the cells that are not sites are filled with house tiles coloured from the day's palette so the artwork is always whole. Hover a block and it tells you whose it is; click and that site opens in a new tab. How it works has the long version.

Why is it different today?

Because a new one is built every night. Each date resolves to a theme — a shape and a palette — and at midnight UTC the whole board is packed again from scratch. Nobody keeps yesterday's position, including the people who paid the most.

Are you tracking me?

No tracking cookies, no account, no analytics product, no advertising pixel. We count views and clicks — an advertiser has to be able to tell whether a tile did anything — and we store a one-way hash of the IP address rather than the address itself, plus one of three words for the kind of device you are on, so we can tell whether the phone version of the board works. If you arrived through one of our own share links we note which button made it — a word we put in the link ourselves, not the address of the page you came from, which we never store. Those rows are deleted after 90 days. The one thing we put on your device is a random number for the current tab, kept in session storage and gone when you close it, so that the viewer count is people rather than page loads — plus, only if you pick a language at the foot of a page, a cookie remembering that choice. The privacy page lists every field we write down, including the two things that leave our server — the fonts, and ordinary web server logs.

So the tiles are ads?

They are paid and free listings, yes — that is what funds the board. But there is no ad network in the page: no third-party script, no tracking pixel, no redirect between the tile and the site it points to. A tile is a name, a colour, a logo and a link, and it is quiet until you point at it.

Some days say “Presented by” someone. What does that mean?

That day's artwork was sponsored — somebody paid for the day itself rather than for a tile in it, and we say so beside the title, on the day and on its archived page for ever. What a sponsor buys is the shape and the wall label, chosen with us from the same library every other day is drawn from. What they cannot buy is the board: the sites in the picture are the same sites, placed by the same code, in the same positions they would have had. A sponsor gets a line of text and no tile.

Are the links safe?

Every site is reviewed by a person before it enters the artwork, and we refuse the obvious categories — malware, phishing, fraud, and the rest of section 3 of the terms. We cannot promise what a site does after that. If a tile leads somewhere it should not, tell us and we will pull it.

How do I find out what a tile actually is?

Point at it, and it names the site. If you would rather read a list than hunt across a picture, the site directory has every listed site with its category, a line about it and a link straight there — no hovering, and it works on a phone. Each one also has a page of its own showing every mosaic it has been part of.

Can I see the old ones?

Yes — the archive has every mosaic we have published, a month at a time, and each day has a permanent page of its own showing the board exactly as it was: the same shape, the same palette, the same sites in the same positions. A published day is never rebuilt, so the page you find in a year is the picture that was on the wall that morning.

It is tiny on my phone.

It is. The board is 140 columns wide at every screen size, because the blocks people paid for sit at fixed coordinates and dropping columns would hide them. On a phone that puts a cell at about two pixels. So a tap does not open anything: it brings up a panel naming the site, its category and its link, with a button to visit it — and a second tap on the same tile opens it too. At two pixels a tap lands near a tile rather than on one, and nobody should be sent to a stranger's website by a mis-tap. Press and hold still gives you the same tooltip a hover gives on a desktop.

Why is my site listed? I never signed up.

Because we added it. Most listings were submitted by the people who run them, but a few we chose ourselves from the public web and marked Curated by Pixeloom. A curated listing is not a customer, a partner or a sponsor — it has agreed to nothing, we do not use its logo, and being listed is not an endorsement of it or by it. If you would rather not be here, say so and it comes out, including its name from any archived artwork it appeared in; we ask for no reason and no proof of ownership. If instead you would rather run the listing yourself, its page has an Is it yours? link — a person checks every claim, and approving one hands you a private link to that listing's numbers and nothing else. The editorial policy has the whole of it.

If you want a tile

How do I get one?

Open claim your spot, give us the site, a category and a logo, and pick a size. A person reviews it, and once it is approved your tile enters the next mosaic that is generated.

What does it cost?

The current prices — including whatever discount is running — are on how it works, read live from the same place the registration panel reads them, so they cannot disagree. No card is taken when you submit.

What do I actually get for it?

A block of your size in every mosaic while your listing runs, re-placed each night, with your logo on it at every size, a page of your own listing every mosaic you have been woven into, and a permanent page in the archive for every day you were in. Not a fixed position, and not a promised number of visitors — section 5 of the terms is explicit about the difference, and how it works explains what the packer optimises for.

Can I change my logo, size, or link later?

Yes — email us and we will change it, and it takes effect from the next mosaic. There is no self-serve editor yet.

Can I get my listing removed?

At any time, by asking. It leaves the next mosaic that is generated. Artworks that already exist keep the tile that was in them, because they are a record of a day that happened.

The rest

Can I put the mosaic on my own site?

Yes, free, no account and no key. Drop this in:

<iframe src="https://pixeloom.art/embed/today?v=1"
        width="360" height="420" loading="lazy"
        style="border:0" title="Today's Pixeloom"></iframe>

It shows the day's artwork, its title, and a few of the sites woven into it as real links, so your readers can go straight to them. It is a picture and some text rather than the live board — about seventy elements and one cached image — so it will not slow your page down, and nothing inside it can reach out of the frame. Keep the Pixeloom mark and the link back; that is the only condition.

Who runs this?

A small independent operation, reachable at [email protected]. There is no phone queue and no support portal — that address is answered by the people who built the thing.

Do you sell data?

No. Not the advertiser table, not the event table, not to anyone. There is also very little to sell — see privacy.

Something is broken, or I want to say something.

The contact page lists what that inbox is for and how long we take to answer.