Expert Insights, Tips, & Perspectives
Hacker News 2.0 – One Week Later
10 days ago I launched HN2.0. Some loved it, and some hated it. But few, it seems, ignored it. Since then the site has gotten tens of thousands of hits with essentially no promotional effort on my part, except for posting to HN, Twitter, Quora, and my blog about it (all free of charge).
Most of the feedback that I’ve gotten has been very positive, and a couple of site owners have even contacted me personally to ask about terms for getting their content featured prominently on the page or for wanting to establish an advertising arrangement.
I’m not… Continue reading
Pinstagram: This Could Be Huge
This morning, as I do every morning now, I went to my Hacker News dashboard (HN2.co) and checked out today’s Hacker News front-page stories. In spite of the fact that I generally don’t take interest in mashups, one caught my eye: Pinstagram. I clicked through to the site and was pleasantly surprised to find out that one of the founders is an old acquaintance, Pek Pongpaet (formerly of Mortal Kombat fame). Since this was a project by someone that I personally know, I decided to give it a shot instead of ignoring it as “Just another Mashup site”.
Here’s… Continue reading
Hacker News 2.0 Challenges
So this past weekend I put together and launched the Hacker News 2.0 site. The response has been lukewarm so far, but yesterday the site had over 2000 uniques, most of which spent more than 2 minutes on the page (according to Google Analytics), so I’m not complaining.
Immediately after launching the site got blocked by HN (the source for it’s content) because HN2 essentially blasted them with requests (Because it was loading the results in real-time for each visitor). I then rewrote the data fetch to occur less frequently and to cache the results (of course while respecting… Continue reading
Hacker News 2.0 2.0
Talk about iteration! This morning I announced my redesigned dashboard for the popular Hacker News website (news.ycombinator.com), humbly dubbed “Hacker News 2.0“. The site was promptly swamped with ALOT of traffic, which then caused the server to be blacklisted (or at least temporarily blocked) by the original HackerNews site – the source for all of HN2‘s content. Of course the comments poured in pointing out that the site “doesn’t work”.
Well here we are several hours, and a few lines of code later, and the site is back up and running faster than ever. now instead of… Continue reading
#Evernote Web Clipper – First Impressions
Those of us in the tech industry have to remember lots and lots of information. Of course I’m not trying to belittle the farmers of the world, as I’m sure they have lots of stuff to remember too – however I don’t recall ever being a farmer so I can only speak from the perspective I know – that of the tech professional.
The not-so-secret-secret is that when you are expected to constantly absorb whole gigabytes of data about every operating system, every web platform, every networking device, every email system, and so on – eventually some things get….lost. That… Continue reading