Show HN: My first RoR project. Domain appraisal engine | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My first RoR project. Domain appraisal engine

domainmongrel.com

17 pointsredmaverick45 comments

This is my first Show HN: post. Domain Mongrel calculates the worth of a website/domain name based on different factors like popularity, length, search volume, dictionary, etc.

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It's dead for me.

NoMethodError in SearchController#search

undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass

http://www.domainmongrel.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&domai...

It stopped working suddenly! I just restarted the server. Hopefully everything should be ok.

No Joy. Still NoMethodError in SearchController#search

I'm still getting "undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass" in "lib/modules/google_count.rb:22:in `search_count'"

I'm going to guess that your Google API parser is being rate limited thanks to the traffic volume you're seeing. Try adding some logging to that piece.

Also, you are running an outdated version of Rails that needs a security patch.

Great look for a first Rails project though, keep plugging away! Remember that most people aren't lucky enough to have popularity break their app ;)

Edit for code sample:

    Rails.logger.info " * Hitting Google now: #{your_google_parser.response.inspect}"

Redeploy, then:

   heroku logs -tail

Second edit for Google API advice:

From what I remember the GDATA APIs have not-entirely-documented rate limits. One naive solution I wrote in the past merely waited one second between sequential requests. This will obviously impact your app's responsiveness, so you'll want to figure out another strategy once you get it back up. Also, once you implement your rate limiting you still might have to wait ten minutes or so before Google lets you back in.

You guessed it right... unfortunately, this will end up killing my break on hn :( I will try to increase google rate limits

Try faking the Google piece for now (maybe only on every other request?) to get the app up and running again. You can legitimately fix it after the traffic dies down.

Edit: You got muted down to the 4th page, at #130 something down from the top 30. Probably the victim of some flagging or a moderator. Sorry.

Nope. Most assuredly not ok.

Same error for me, too. Not at all surprising that a first time Rails app wouldn't be able to handle the craziness that is showing up on the hacker news front page.

My sympathies to the author. This stuff is hard. Don't get dispirited by it.

Same here, still looks to be down ...

Same here :-(

http://www.domainmongrel.com/search?domain[]= duuude. Run app in production mode, to avoid this page with debug info. And add some filtration for input data.

I thought checking for empty strings and non alphanumeric characters was good enough. Needs more work!

Also, precompile assets: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html#in-product...

That would happen automatically by running in production mode.

I like it :) Some pointers...

- Validation on the input form

- HTML looks like it's been generated in some WYSIWYG editor... Have a read over this: http://learn.shayhowe.com/advanced-html-css/

thanks :-) I did the html with a lot of <br/> statements and ad hoc CSS. I need to learn how to do this more professionally. Thanks for the link.

The Domain domainmongrel.com is valued at: $0.01 You should give yourself more credit! I'm guessing you pull whois data, PageRank, Compete, MozRank, and Alexa data, and use that to score the domain?

exactly! Alexa Rank and also I applied some linear regression, Zipf power law with R language. R is really cool!!

I "valued" two of my domains one that has a lot of visitis and one that does not, the one that does not seemed to get higher valued because it was a .com address.

Looking forward to see the code on github, thanks for sharing.

Nice! I like it, even though some of my domains aren't worth the $8 I paid for them.

Should the action of the button be 'Appraise' instead of 'Appraisal'?

Yeah! It should be 'Appraise' or 'Go', thanks for pointing it out.

It says that my domain (http://vv20.com) worth $64K cant understand why. http://www.domainmongrel.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&domai...

It is down :( :( I really appreciate the good will of the hn community. Any tips on what went wrong.

Care to post how you set it up? It seems that the app was running in development mode.

yeah I ran it in development mode. I tried running it with rails server -e production -p 80 but it did not work.

open source it and we'll send in pull requests : )

I will need to sanitize the code before uploading it to the github. Also, I found the culprit.. google api :(

This is my first Show HN post and also my first HackerNews submission. Please leave feedback.

It doesn't work for me. I tried google.com but it throws a Rails error page.

" NoMethodError in SearchController#search "...

What tools and methods did you use to make that logo? I like the style.

I used MS paint. I don't remember the exact font. Image I got from google search.

I assume it is a CC-Licensed image?

No, it isn't :( (http://www.clipartof.com/portfolio/patrimonio/illustration/r...)

Got some code to show?

The UTF-8 "check" in the URL was pretty cool.

Thanks for the comment! I have a github account. I will upload it there and paste the link here.

that would be cool, would love to see how it works

That is a workaround for an Internet Explorer bug. You can read about it here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4104474/rails-3-utf-8-que...

dead here. This might be of particular interest to a hacker though: _csrf_token: "nVpKIc5NEHWvddNf5r3Hrzo/4KsB2+1BAVlOk3IY1Mw=" session_id: "e771d56b3c20aff090dc76b3e994fc5e"

anything .co.uk looks to be worth 0 so .com centric?

.com .org .info .us .jp .es .in .br .fr pretty much I don't have enough info on .co.uk

same for .me

> "The Domain google.co.uk is valued at: $0.00"

> "The Domain google.com is valued at: $2,009,961,449.08"

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