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I quit my job to make free web tools

nslookup.io

21–30 of 105 posts

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#21
post #9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the ad images are also hosted on your server, or they still can be tracking. Not criticism. I applaud your approach. I just point out that running non-tracking ads is harder than you would believe.

Hmm, not that I've taken a second look, I noticed that I added a hidden image hosted on their servers when I implemented the ads. It's used for counting the ad impressions, but it looks like it drops a 1-day valid cookie as well :/

Good luck standing between those tricksy ad-folk and their quarry.

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#22
I'm always curious how many visitors you have to get to reach $500 per month numbers from ads. I understand the author probably can't reveal exact numbers here but if anyone knows rough but real life numbers I'd be curious to hear (I haven't ever done ad based revenue myself and I don't trust CPM numbers I'd read by googling, or the spread is just too broad).

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#24
post #21
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, not that I've taken a second look, I noticed that I added a hidden image hosted on their servers when I implemented the ads. It's used for counting the ad impressions, but it looks like it drops a 1-day valid cookie as well :/

Good luck standing between those tricksy ad-folk and their quarry.

It's called tracking for a reason.

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#25
post #9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the ad images are also hosted on your server, or they still can be tracking. Not criticism. I applaud your approach. I just point out that running non-tracking ads is harder than you would believe.

Hmm, not that I've taken a second look, I noticed that I added a hidden image hosted on their servers when I implemented the ads. It's used for counting the ad impressions, but it looks like it drops a 1-day valid cookie as well :/

It's a little funny to me you added a literal tracking pixel to your website from a VPN company and then came to HN to preach that you don't do any tracking

That said, due to third party cookie changes, tracking pixels have very limited usefulness these days and it's unlikely it actually tracks people over a full 1 day period

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#26
post #4

Someone on Reddit asked how I make a living. Might be interesting for folks here too. Right now, we're living off our savings and my wife's salary. Both sites are already profitable, though. I've recently launched an API for NsLookup, which now generates around 100 USD / month, and both sites have ads that generate income. Not enough to replace my salary yet, but I'm confident I can increase it over time. Ads have a…

Good luck, mate! If you bother to verify NsLookup.io on SaaSHub, I can get it on its weekly newsletter. That could help you a bit. (just ping me by email/twitter once done). Cheers!

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#27
post #4

Someone on Reddit asked how I make a living. Might be interesting for folks here too. Right now, we're living off our savings and my wife's salary. Both sites are already profitable, though. I've recently launched an API for NsLookup, which now generates around 100 USD / month, and both sites have ads that generate income. Not enough to replace my salary yet, but I'm confident I can increase it over time. Ads have a…

Are you not concerned that you are leaking exactly what domains people are looking up in realtime?

If I used a service like that I would expect some degree of privacy that goes beyond this. It's crazy to me that you're doing this to be honest

https://plausible.io/nslookup.io/pages?period=realtime

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#28
post #5

I hope that you make more than your salary, how did you attract users to website? Its very hard to get users to visit your site. I have posted my site ( https://text2db.com/ ) on hackernews, product hunt and reddit for getting reviews but got very few views (guess the idea is bad?), please do recommend me tips on how to increase traffic for site. Thanks.

Don't let one random person dissuade you but my take is that while you consider your text format simple its one more thing I'd have to learn the structure and symbols for.

An other issue you have is that if someone understands the concept of foreign keys already then they've probably already figured out basic create table statements. Lastly, learning a new tool for something that is just a blip (table creation only) doesn't seem worth it.

So your audience for something like this is people that sort of get what a database is but don't know create table statements or people that struggle with tooling enough that an easier mechanism might be useful. I'd suggest pivoting to something like a spreadsheet2db tool. Where filename == database name, sheet name == table name, column name == column name. And the spreadsheet approach lets people actually provide data also. You can also roundtrip and have db2spreadsheet. Once you start supporting rows of data instead of just table creation you open up a lot more use-cases. Plus a lot of people have basic spreadsheet skills.

Everything above is completely off the cuff and I've done zero research to valid the idea. I know there are some integrations in Excel and some tools like SQL Developer partially support this. Another options (to support data in addition to table creation) might be to look into supporting markdown or restructured tables. Might be cool to be able to prototype a database from a basic doc page, markup2db.

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#29
post #4

Someone on Reddit asked how I make a living. Might be interesting for folks here too. Right now, we're living off our savings and my wife's salary. Both sites are already profitable, though. I've recently launched an API for NsLookup, which now generates around 100 USD / month, and both sites have ads that generate income. Not enough to replace my salary yet, but I'm confident I can increase it over time. Ads have a…

Are you not concerned that you are leaking exactly what domains people are looking up in realtime? If I used a service like that I would expect some degree of privacy that goes beyond this. It's crazy to me that you're doing this to be honest https://plausible.io/nslookup.io/pages?period=realtime

There is no privacy issue here, there aren't source IP addresses attached, you can't tell who's looking these up. It's up there with Amazon's (for example) "other people bought" recommendations, you can't tell who did the looking up.

They're just domain names which are effectively public records. And even if you thought you registered a super secret domain name (no such thing), maybe the registrar looked it up, or some bot found it through brute force (if nslookup.io is open to bots).

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#30
> Mobile game that divides the earth in hexagons

Interesting that I hear about this twice in the space of a week or so. Neal Stephenson was talking about it on the Lex Fridman podcast too. Apparently it's not possible. You'll always need a certain number of pentagons to complete the tiling.

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