Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

I've been writing fiction. For years my side projects were all programming related, and that was awesome, but last summer I decided to try something different and get into creative writing again. I used to love it as a child and haven't done it in years. It is nice to do something that is quite different from my day job, and brings in a bit of a satisfying side income as well (not that it'll be paying my rent any time soon).

Building a tool to make use of un-used domain names.

https://www.newsy.co

I had about ~30 domain names which were not doing anything. I got tired of them. But I didn't want to spend time working on them.

So I built Newsy, which converts your domain name into a fully functional & automated content site. It finds niche contents and display them like Reddit.

Over the months, I've built membership, newsletters, comments, social sharing, widgets, RSS, API and even sending email using your domain name via GMail.

Finally, I've started to letting these domain names to monetize via adding your own ads.

Got any un-used domain names? Would love to hear your feedback!

What is the tech stack for this project?

Currently working on a complete user mode ISDN BRI+PRI stack for interfacing old equipment plus a number of utilities for it like a softswitch and things like a H.320 multipelxer. Once I got a baseline working I might work on some little integration programs like a bot that lets you connect to a discord voice call from an ISDN videoconferencing terminal.

Once I’m satisfied I have an old CMTS and limesdr sitting around I might try to build a custom DOCSIS modem with.

My girlfriend and I really enjoy good food and travel. We spend a lot of our time cooking, eating, and going to breweries and wineries. We have a few favorite cities near us, like Charlottesville and the surrounding wine country in Virginia, and Portland, Maine. We've been there with enough frequency that we've developed a sort of reputation as the go-to experts for those areas, and have sent a long e-mail itinerary and travel guide to our close friends probably 10 or 15 times for each place.

Sometimes our friend doesn't drink alcohol, so we go through and scrub all the breweries and wineries. Sometimes they're gluten free, so all of the pizza and bagels we love get cut. After doing this several times, we realized it would be cool to have an app to do this. So that is my side project!

It will be part Canva, part Facebook Recommendations, maybe part knowledge-base? Filterable lists, creation of itineraries, notes about each Place. Export to a static site with a link you can share. It is already integrated with Google Maps and Places APIs, so it's pretty easy to get up and running.

The neat thing is, as I mentioned above, it has filters. So you can tag places with "winery" or "vegetarian" or something, and when you're crafting your collection of places for your friends, you can filter on those tags really easily. You could just click the "winery" tag to instantly create a "Virginia Wine Guide".

I'm not totally sure it has broad appeal, but I'm hoping a few travel bloggers might get some use out of it. V3 will probably have some sort of "export to CMS" feature.