Show HN: Simple User Icons

I've been working on this on weekends for a while now; it's now stable enough for some early adopting... Please report any bugs and feel free to ask questions. You can also contact me at andrew@parti.cl. Thanks.

Good question :o(

When it was first announced it seemed terrible - the estimate for even the unused development site was significant. But then I tracked that down to some dumb coding of my own (a much-too-frequent cron-job). With that fixed, the site is pretty efficient (which is by design - it's supposed to scale well, after all). So I'm hoping it will work out OK. This is very much (I think) the kind of site that should work well on GAE - there's a lot of scope for caching.

And this is one motivation for posting here - I want to see how well it handles higher traffic. Hopefully from that I can work out what a decent amount to charge would be (originally I was hoping for as low as a dollar a month a feed, but the changes may push that higher - perhaps significantly so).

it's not intended to replace photographs. in fact, one thing i would hope to do in the future is allow people to upload photographs. instead, it's meant to replace the auto-generated images that already exist that use IP addresses (like on stack-overflow, for example). those are really ugly; mine are much nicer (and more flexible).

while i was developing this approach i tried lots of ideas. it's actually quite hard to get images with (1) a wide range, to avoid "collisions", (2) attractive designs, and (3) coherent forms (that don't look like a random mess, making them easier to remember). one of the things that helps a lot in making these more distinctive/individual/memorable is the diagonal symmetry. another is the generally consistent hues within any one icon.

this is a cool idea , but i think that if you want it to catch on, you need to offer it for free . It will be hard to justify charging for your service . Bandwidth and server costs are so negligible that it will be hard to tack a price tag on this .

yes. but i'm only planning to charge what is needed to cover the costs. if those are reasonable then i think some people would be willing to pay for something a bit more attractive. if not, well, at least i tried.

(i'm not adverse to making money from this, if it becomes wildly popular, but it's not my main motivation. i did the ground work years ago and then posted a link to my notes in the thread on the robots approach here. someone contacted me about that, asking if i they could use it. i suggested a service, since i wanted to learn gae, and they thought that was a good idea...)