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Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

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Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#511

Post by megamindbrian »

baystep wrote: post #464
yourduskquibble wrote: post #350

I just saw this thread, and honestly it is probably too late to get noticed by many, but I'm attempting to 'unsuck the web' with my project[0] by pinning "sticky" website elements where they belong - i.e. the website header shouldn't steal your screen real estate and scroll down the page with you. My project/uBO filter list removes the "annoying" elements noted above as well as other "features" of websites (e.g. soci…

Could you add/did you add killing the annoying "call to action" pop-up dialog? You know, you visit an article and BAM! A fullscreen modal asking to sign-up for their book newsletter? That would be awesome.

Oh man, so annoying. Here's my immitation of the thought process of the marketing team that designed it: "enter your email address so we can continue sending you offers and adverts and all kinds of information on that thing that you clicked on that we are now blocking with this popup preventing you from reading even though you're just passing by".

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#512

Post by weddpros »

Danilka wrote: post #407
weddpros wrote: post #203

I built https://sslping.com/ to help monitor website TLS/SSL security and certificates. It has 300 users and checks almost 7000 servers every day for TLS problems. It's a little like SSLlabs server test, only much faster (5 seconds instead of 2 minutes), plus the tests are recurring every day, and you receive the diff if any. It's always been a joy to receive thank you emails from users, or adding new features for us…

I love it, way to go! You should submit it as a "Show HN" 1. You should charge for it. Maybe after a month of monitoring or something. 2. Give more actionable responses. Maybe some links or directions on how to fix the issues. 3. Can you make any money on affiliate links to paid certificates? If not, direct people to Letsencrypt when their cert expires.

Thanks! I did submit a Show HN, but I only got 1 or 2 upvotes and a few visitors... Go figure, this comment had more success!

As for charging or monetizing one way or another, I'm still thinking of the best way. It's not easy when you already have 300 free users.

And I've already considered giving more actionable advice, it's in the backlog already!

But thanks for your comments!

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#513

Post by koliber »

thsealienbstrds wrote: post #488

I've been working on `moncat`, a tool that concatenates e-mails. It's very 'Unix-y' in the sense that it's supposed to do this and only this. I created it because I wanted to have a way to make notes without being dependent on apps. With moncat, I can use any e-mail client to incrementally create larger text files. Currently, I'm using it to write a journal in Markdown that is automatically converted to HTML. How tha…

Ha! I love it. I just recently created a tool for personal use that does something similar to this.

I use Evernote notes with bullet lists as my TODO list. I created a tool that takes each line of a received email and adds it to my TODO list at the top. It is very convenient. My wife can email me things that need to get done!

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#514

Post by aeorgnoieang »

teapot7 wrote: post #398

I guess I do ask for money for this, but it's pretty overengineered and I wrote it knowing that nobody wanted or needed it: Long ago, when Sun workstations were new and exciting, I wrote a simple Roman numeral digital clock, which just showed the time in Roman numerals. My friend, instead of admiring my cleverness, said "But that's not how the Romans told the time" - which is true. The Roman day started at dawn and f…

> A waste of time and money, but one which made me happy.

Reads like the best kind of waste of time and money!

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#515

Post by heavenlyblue »

baystep wrote: post #464
yourduskquibble wrote: post #350

I just saw this thread, and honestly it is probably too late to get noticed by many, but I'm attempting to 'unsuck the web' with my project[0] by pinning "sticky" website elements where they belong - i.e. the website header shouldn't steal your screen real estate and scroll down the page with you. My project/uBO filter list removes the "annoying" elements noted above as well as other "features" of websites (e.g. soci…

Could you add/did you add killing the annoying "call to action" pop-up dialog? You know, you visit an article and BAM! A fullscreen modal asking to sign-up for their book newsletter? That would be awesome.

I suppose the script that removes all of the 'would you like to receive desktop notifications from this website?' popups would be nice as well.

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#516

Post by jaden »

https://shortmarks.com - Keyword bookmarks across browsers (I started using them in Firefox, and it was a pain to keep them in sync). It has about 1,400 users, much fewer active. I keep thinking I should rebuild it and figure out a way to make money from it.

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#518

Post by jconcilio »

http://www.penginsforeveryone.com - giving away stuffed penguins. Just because we can. (Hoping to actually register this as a nonprofit, but right now it's basically a completely unprofitable business venture.)

ETA: On the development end this has been a pretty great project for my fiance and I. He built (and I'm learning from his efforts) a database for processing requests, filtering by priority, etc., and then an integration that allows those we want to send to be exported to a file we can pull into our stamps.com account, and that creates drafts of the Wordpress posts that power our map of sent friends. The database is pretty big (we're sitting at about 21K requests right now on a shared hosting platform) so some of the work has been to load the requests asynchronously so you're not waiting for 21,000 rows before you can manage requests...

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#520

Post by jonberk218 »

This is probably going to be buried but YES, my weekly newsletter The Random Roundup(https://tinyletter.com/randomroundup) Granted, down the line I may be able to leverage the audience for something but right now sharing the gems I find while hitch hiking the internet is so awesome I'd probably even pay to do it.
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