http://fidness.com is my little pet project. I've never let it get out to more than a few of my nerd-ish friends, who inconveniently don't do enough physical activity to get anything out of the site. I don't know if that's their fault for being lazy or mine for having an underwhelming site.
Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?
51–60 of 127 posts
Re: Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Random curiosity: did you change your name from Steve to Mark? If it isn't personal, mind sharing why?
Isn't it obvious? It's one character shorter. Just like one of Arc's guiding principles: "How code looks matters: short names, no swearing". Of course, since ones name is so frequently typed, one might prefer something even shorter. Like, "Joe", as a purely hypothetical example. I'm not sure one can go any shorter than three characters for a common male US name. More seriously, I'm guessing Mark/Steven is of Asian de…
Most Asian Americans I know take their "American" names very seriously, as it's their legal, social, and personal identity.
Growing up Asian in the US, I hated when kids always asked me for my "real" name. I have a Chinese name, as well as an English name. Both are aliases for the person and both are "real".
Re: Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?
#53A lot of people roll their own popurls.com site. I wrote one, too, to teach myself the Apache Wicket framework. This one is for web developers. http://devfunnel.com.
I was going to add the ability to "follow" it on twitter, but I've run out of steam, and no one seems very interested in it. I've moved onto other projects. :)
Re: Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?
#54http://watrcoolr.us Never "launched" it, but I still think it deserves popularity :). It's a browser start page that I made for myself (and use) that displays the top stories for a set of most-emailed-like feeds. The feeds have been tweaked over time to yield the most interesting stories at any given time. After all, they were the most emailed ones... It's not really for news junkies or the news.yc crowd in particula…
This site is very, very cool. I really appreciate super-minimalistic UI's like this. I've bookmarked it. :)
Re: Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?
#55maybe it wouldn't change the world, but if you're into reading multiple local papers "popurls style" http://www.newshoured.com/ might be a friend.
Ha... I was thinking about making the exact same thing! I was going to target it for mobile audiences. Yours seems to work pretty well!
Re: Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?
#56Maybe someone should create a site that collects sites like these... abandoned, mostly-finished ideas. People could go there for inspiration and stuff.
It'd be kinda meta if I created such a site, then submitted that site to itself when no one showed up. :)
Re: Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?
#57A lot of people roll their own popurls.com site. I wrote one, too, to teach myself the Apache Wicket framework. This one is for web developers. http://devfunnel.com . I was going to add the ability to "follow" it on twitter, but I've run out of steam, and no one seems very interested in it. I've moved onto other projects. :)
That's really pretty cool. However, it seems like it would be hard to hold the attention of people who don't like to scroll down.
I guess that's one of my favorite things about HN. Loads fast and only need to scroll on the most commented articles.
Re: Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you looked at work done on keyword extraction from academic literature? http://www.nzdl.org/Kea/ It's simple and accurate.
Yes, we have. What we do is not keyword extraction, our tool suggests tags based on probabilistic algorithms. For example, if your document contains the terms Bush and Obama it should be tagged as politics even if that word is not present in it. Compare to the Yahoo Extraction Tool, for example. This approach will not add new keywords that would help in a search. It's only useful to have an idea of what the document…
When is the API coming? I can see us using this quite a bit.
Re: Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, we have. What we do is not keyword extraction, our tool suggests tags based on probabilistic algorithms. For example, if your document contains the terms Bush and Obama it should be tagged as politics even if that word is not present in it. Compare to the Yahoo Extraction Tool, for example. This approach will not add new keywords that would help in a search. It's only useful to have an idea of what the document…
When is the API coming? I can see us using this quite a bit.
The API is already available although we haven't announced it. There is a WordPress plugin that uses it, called TagMahal.
Please contact us if you'd like to use the API, if you need to do up to 5k queries per day or so it shouldn't have much of an impact on our server.
Re: Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?
#60Certainly not world changing, and most definitely not ready for prime time. But considering it's a couple of guys throwing things at a server a couple of times a month more as stress relief than anything, it's not THAT bad.
And yes, this was before we had even heard of alltop. Our first version was in October 07.