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I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

theappifier.com

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Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#151

Post by dboat »

bad_user wrote: post #148
mountaineer wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rob "CmdTaco" did some analysis - http://cmdrtaco.net/2011/10/then-along-came-hacker-news/ John Sheehan mentioned numbers the other day too - https://twitter.com/#!/johnsheehan/status/156271988195860480 Seems like the "Hacker News 10K" would be an approximate general number or its going to approach that soon.

I never got 10K from Hacker News alone, but on my blog I got 10K from HN combined with Reddit, with the links being submitted at aprox. the same time, for 3 articles I wrote. My website is static, with no MySQL or PHP to speak of (by means of Jekyll), right now hosted on an AWS micro instance, served by Nginx. Prior to this it was hosted on Heroku's free plan, with offloading of static assets to GAE. For free and it…

I don't think it's fair to conclude that wordpress is awful and bloated based on it performing worse than your setup. Static files and a cdn and no dynamic script are the ultimate optimization. Wordpress compares unfavourably because anything involving dynamic features would compare unfavourably.

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#152

Post by dwynings »

dangrossman wrote: post #114
underwater wrote: post #104

I don't want to knock your product, because I know site owners will love it, but does anyone actually like and use these simple apps that wrap a website?

Yes. I do, for one. For a site you like to use every day, being able to just tap and swipe to get to everything is so much better than constantly pinch zooming, aiming for little links, waiting for the page to load, pinch zooming, aiming for little links, etc. of a website.

of a website.

Of a non-mobile optimized website.

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#154

Post by gozman »

magsafe wrote: post #117
gozman wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry Magsafe, you need to have JSON API installed. This is written on the site.

My point was the app should never crash, for whatever reason. You need to handle failures gracefully.

You're right. We didn't anticipate this kind of traffic. We're working on it. Thanks for letting us know. :)

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#155

Post by count »

theDaveB wrote: post #135

Nice idea but you have some competition. Won't mention sites on here, played with a identical solution a few weeks ago. Also found somewhere that is doing a WP app for a one off charge of $17, you download source code, edit it, compile it and submit it to the app store. Dave

Competition should generally be looked at as market validation. How many companies have competition and are doing fine?

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#156

Post by epoxyhockey »

dan1234 wrote: post #94

Have you run this past Apple with regards to their App Store approval policy? I'd be worried about clause 2.12: "2.12 Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected"

This is a very legitimate concern. As an app developer who has had an app rejected 6 months ago on similar grounds (section 10.6), it is something that should be tested. Upon my app being rejected, I added things like push notifications and it still got rejected for the original reason.

For your reference this was the complete description of the rejection:

=======

10.6

We found the user interface of your app is not of sufficient quality to be appropriate for the App Store. Apps that provide a poor user experience are not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.

Specifically, we noticed your app does not take advantage of the iOS platform. It would be appropriate to add iOS specific UI and functionality.

Please evaluate whether you can make the necessary revisions to improve the user experience of your app.

Alternatively, you may wish to consider building a web app using HTML5. HTML5 is the major new version of HTML and enables audio and video to play natively in the browser without requiring proprietary plug-ins. Using HTML5, web apps look and behave like native iPhone and iPad apps, and using HTML5's Offline Application Cache, your web apps work even when the device is offline. With web apps, you have flexibility to deliver as much or as little functionality as you desire.

If you wish to build an HTML5 web app, you can do so and distribute it directly from your web site. It is not appropriate to resubmit an HTML5 web app to the App Store.

To get started with iPhone or iPad web apps, please review Getting Started with iPhone Web Apps.

For a description of the HTML elements and attributes you can use in Safari on iPhone, check out Safari HTML Reference: Introduction.

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#157

Post by seanalltogether »

dan1234 wrote: post #94

Have you run this past Apple with regards to their App Store approval policy? I'd be worried about clause 2.12: "2.12 Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected"

My biggest worry for gozman is that he'll start seeing rejections for template based apps. Apple has been cracking down on these kinds of apps even for very high profile companies. For example, one company I know of has a template based app for every major college in the app store right now. The only difference between them is the icon, splash page, and theme colors inside the app along with distinct data feeds. Apple is threatening to remove all their apps unless they do something to differentiate them further.

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#158

Post by dools »

wodow wrote: post #95
city41 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN has grown a good deal in the past year or so. It has quite a big "slashdot effect" now :)

Has anyone who's been hackernews'd done an analysis on the load numbers? Back in the day there was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect#Notes_and_refer...

I got about 12k people through to my blog post "Thanks Louis C.K now here's my dad" post the other day, and then about 4,000 of them clicked through to nickdooley.com (which is on the same server).

I had already increased my MaxClients setting to 120 a few weeks previously when I got about the same number through to "Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever written is spaghetti code" post but I forgot that with people downloading those mp3 files, the connections would get held open for much longer so I had to put MaxClients up again to 220 and restart apache at one point (which I'm sure kicked a bunch of people off, some of whom would have abandoned trying to load the site at that point).

With MaxClients set at 220 the site was able to serve pages quickly and reliably the rest of the day as well as allowing roughly 5500 people to download my Dad's music files.

I'm running the site on Apache 2.x on a CentOS VM with php 5.2.x. We don't serve static assets with nginx so it's all coming out of the same apache instance so I have 2GB of RAM on that VM (yes I know I really need to get around to sorting that out).

We have a crappy cache in Decal CMS (which we make and which runs all our sites) right now which still serves pages from PHP but does so from cached content.

At some point we're going to move to using Varnish in front of nginx for static assets so that the only requests that get through to apache are to generate the pages after a site publish and requests where a cookie is present (ie. when someone is actually editing their site) but for now we're able to manage with just the shitty hack we've got in place to served cached documents.

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#160

Post by herval »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #142

Cool idea, but this is just going to make the signal:noise ratio in the app store worse =(

I don't feel that a lot on the app store... the sorting by relevance seems to work well, at least in my experience.

that said, I suffer it on the Android market, where everything I search returns a thousand different apps in random order (e.g. search for Skype retrieves a dozen apps - some times Skype itself is not even the first result)

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