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Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

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Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#151
post #48

I spent 7 years building my own static site generator CMS. I added drag and drop, Wordpress-like UI and lot of complex functionality based on studying extensively the existing systems like Jekyll, Hugo, etc. Originally, I started with a Wordpress theme I designed myself. It was great until it wasn't - I tried to add E-Commerce to it and it was the most pathetic architecture for a CMS I've ever worked with. Although I…

this is very cool, good job!

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#152

A quotes website: https://thinkmindful.com - I love quotes and have been collecting them for years. I thought it would be nice to share them with others and offer a weekly quotes by email service too (sadly neglected for a while).

love this design!

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#153

About half of the 30 or so bands I have played with have been abandoned after a couple of gigs, or non at all. Mostly I've only just played music for fun. It's much more fun (and certainly easier) playing at some friend's house every week for 18 months than it is to book performances, market the band, produce works for the public, etc. I have a sticker on my truck that says "This Sticker Will Last Longer Than Your Ba…

I am in the same situation at the moment and it is a bit sad. I've been trying to do more "solo" work because I'm the only constant in my musical journey. I envy bands that last for a long time because they can make it work, but I had to travel a lot and it made it impossible to have a band that would endure even the smallest of hiatus.

At the same time, every time I am with musicians that "made it" only talk about how miserable is to tour and how horrible it is to be constantly doing music for a living, so I feel lucky to make money out of software development. But I guess the stupid teenage dream still lives somewhere in me.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#154
post #48

I spent 7 years building my own static site generator CMS. I added drag and drop, Wordpress-like UI and lot of complex functionality based on studying extensively the existing systems like Jekyll, Hugo, etc. Originally, I started with a Wordpress theme I designed myself. It was great until it wasn't - I tried to add E-Commerce to it and it was the most pathetic architecture for a CMS I've ever worked with. Although I…

In its current form this sign-up page looks sketchy or just broken at best:

  - Terms of service link is broken  
  - No explanation like this on the site itself  
  - ‘Beta tester 50% off’ doesn’t link to anything  
  - Header image is cut off
For those reasons I would not trust my email to this site if I came across it on the web

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#155
I was using an open source Android app once. The app was (deliberately) missing some simple features that I wanted. I was also interested in tinkering with Android development, so I proceeded to fork the app and hack in my feature (just to scratch my own itch).

As a further learning exercise, I decides to try and publish it on F-Droid, which I eventually managed to do (once again solely because I wanted to tinker with it). I made no attempt to promote the app and did not really expect anyone to use it. Since then it has not become a runaway success, but there must be some folks using it since the repo has received a number of stars/issues/PRs. We have continued to mature the app and build out more features. (Not at all what I had expected when I sat down to hack in the first change....)

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#156
post #38

"Oh By".[1] It's a "universal shortener".[2] You can take any block of text and condense it to a simple code that you can chalk up anywhere. It's the same idea as a QR code but you can just quickly write it out with a pencil or chalk it on the street ... or verbally state it. I'm convinced there is some use-case that this elegantly solves and would be genuinely valuable to people ... but beyond mentioning it here on…

This is just a pastebin, isn't it?

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#157
post #122
post #38

"Oh By".[1] It's a "universal shortener".[2] You can take any block of text and condense it to a simple code that you can chalk up anywhere. It's the same idea as a QR code but you can just quickly write it out with a pencil or chalk it on the street ... or verbally state it. I'm convinced there is some use-case that this elegantly solves and would be genuinely valuable to people ... but beyond mentioning it here on…

I would recommend blacklisting a few words while generating the URL. This is what was generated for me https://0x.co/done.html?code=632CUM

... and the latin word for "along with" should be on that list ?

But seriously ...

We did, in fact, disable certain outputs but they were all related to legibility and mistaken transcription. For instance, no O/0 and no l/1, if I remember correctly ...

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#158
post #156
post #38

"Oh By".[1] It's a "universal shortener".[2] You can take any block of text and condense it to a simple code that you can chalk up anywhere. It's the same idea as a QR code but you can just quickly write it out with a pencil or chalk it on the street ... or verbally state it. I'm convinced there is some use-case that this elegantly solves and would be genuinely valuable to people ... but beyond mentioning it here on…

This is just a pastebin, isn't it?

I don't know what it is.

It made me happy to build it and I hope that there is some emergent use-case for it that organically comes into being.

Surprise me :)

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#159
During covid we did online classes where teachers present the slides and everything was recorded. I built a simple program that sliced videopresentation into slides and also sliced the audio for every slide. It was convinient to go through presentation slide by slide and play audio what teacher said during the slide.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#160
Over COVID I wrote a novel-length... thing. I hesitate to call it a text adventure, or a game, even though that's what it looks like on the surface. I'm not sure what to call it.

The joke at the beginning was that it's a "travel simulator" for a period in time when you couldn't travel. I worked on it every day for about eight months, and I think I showed it to maybe six people. It was mostly a writing exercise, and an excuse to do research.

It's "abandoned" in the sense that I'm not driven to do more work on it, but it is "content complete" at about 300 pages, and it can be played.

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