dstainer

The concept was to make sites like HackerNews, DZone and Digg because those were the most relevant sites that match my blog on NoSQL. However, after having them on the site for probably a month and a half I never registered a single click. So I pulled them from the site.

I think the big submission/share buttons are the Facebook Like/Share, Google Buzz and one of the several Retweet buttons. I'm going to try and put those up on my site but Squarespace doesn't make that a very easy thing to do...

Derek

I've used Squarespace for the past 2+ months for my blog on NoSQL and it's been great. I looked around at the various options when I thought about starting up and in the end went with Squarespace because of two reasons:

1) It's the hosting provider of highscalability.com and Todd Hoff had a lot of good things to say about the platform. 2) I saw it as the quickest way to get something that looked good and allowed me to just start on the content.

It's not the perfect platform. Sometimes you have to some crazy things to make things work. But overall I've been a very satisfied customer.

If you are interested you can try it out for free for 14-days to see if it works for you.

Derek

If you use AddThis they have the ability to add an article to HN.

I think the main question would be do you currently have access to any resources that you plan on using to create this software? Do they have any experience in this field, or is this going to be a learning experience for them, just like it would be for you.

Estimation is very hard, my suggestion would be to try and find what is the minimum viable product that you want to produce, because in all likelihood you aren't going to be able to duplicate every feature that Autodesk has, and find some developers who have worked on this type of work to give you some idea of time. Even then figure that their estimates are going to be off and add some buffer. But still somewhat of a crap shoot because stuff always pops up.

Derek

Couple of notes from my perspective, not really webapp specific but still relevant, at least I think so.

- Settle in on a VCS subversion and git are two front runners to get you started on. Of course others exist but those are two big ones. Each has its own benefits and disadvantages.

- For bug tracking, JIRA has a starter package that is $10 per app for like 10 users. Some people like JIRA/Fisheye/Greenhopper etc, others don't so use your judgment. I think for the price and the functionality you get it's a decent deal. Beware though if you grow past the number of users it's a little bit of sticker shock.

- Look into either Agile type strategy. I've used it on several projects and it has served me well. Scope is way beyond this post or comment so I'll leave you to research. Again mileage will vary based off team experience and leadership.

Just a couple of thoughts. Hope this helps!

Derek

Thank you for all of the feedback that some of you have sent me via email. I will take all of it into consideration. I'll take the week to implement the changes and might ask for some more feedback later.

Derek

Thank you for the feedback! I definitely agree with the comparison table. I'm trying to get that information collected and put up on the site, because it needs to be there.

Derek

Clickable link:

http://www.nosqldatabases.com

I'm sorry it was bad form and I apologize, I would remove it but I can't edit the original message anymore. However, my point was still legitimate, even if the link was not.

I agree with a couple of the posters, I think the JVM is the core piece of technology to take away from the Java ecosystem. Especially as more languages can compile byte code to run on it.

That being said Java still plays a very big role in backend systems and don't forget that some important backend tools i.e. Hadoop and Cassandra are written in java. So I wouldn't write it off just yet.

Derek

http://nosqldatabases.com

Just to repeat what others have already said. NoSQL is basically any data store that is not relational. So it describes data stores that are key/value pair, document, object, graph and column store just to name a few.

Basically a number of these solutions were created to address the scalability issues that companies faced when trying to scale at extreme levels, think Facebook and Twitter. Anyway, it's a really interesting topic, at least to me.

Derek

http://nosqldatabases.com