sideproject

I've been developing a tool that lets you create your own HackerNews. Then it grew to a SaaS that lets you create, manage and grow an online community.

http://www.hellobox.co

Reddit Android is a good one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/

You can always start your own of course, if you are interested - http://www.hellobox.co

I absolutely love comments on HN and they are probably the main reason I read this site a lot. Some times, the posts themselves are quite self-explanatory from the title and I just go straight to the discussions.

I created a little site called HackerNews Club

http://hackernews.club

Where you can easily search for user's submissions and comments. FYI, here's Dan's comments :)

http://hackernews.club/luu#search/52e35e01f172df6d183c59633c...

And HN users ordered by the number of comments they have made.

http://hackernews.club/#search/39a2159841122c713bf4324d6f9de...

I run a number of side project sites and I do much of my work late at night.

I have one simple rule for myself - which is to never deploy anything at night before I go to bed. I've made several critical mistakes which I deployed to production and then went to bed only to wake up and find out that users couldn't use my products.

Thesedays, I do all deployment in the morning - that way, even if there is a critical bug, I am awake to catch it and fix it quickly.

I noticed how adding an image doesn't actually upload it to the server, but rather encodes it - which becomes a very large text. What implication does that have? What if I have a very large text with many images?

I've been using CKEditor, which has been somewhat of a go-to text editor for many and it's been around for many years. Its image uploading seems to work relatively well.

Really like the live streaming of Google Analytics at the bottom. :) Now I have an idea how much traffic you receive when you reach the #1 spot on HN on the weekend.

Thanks!

Good idea - some people wanted to go directly to the link, but I might make both links available!

Good picking! Will fix that up right now. Thanks! :)

Thank you!

Since it's within HN's crowd, I wanted to find a nice "programming font" on Google Web Fonts. I'm using this.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata

Other good "programming fonts" I found are

Cousine - https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Cousine

Droid sans mono - https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Droid+Sans+Mono

Roboto Mono - https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto+Mono

Hello. Would love to get your feedback! Here's my profile as an example. :)

https://hackernews.club/hacker/profile/sideproject

A few weeks ago, there was a Show HN post regarding GitHub profile widget - I always wanted to do a widget, so I was inspired by that post (and also, since the code was in GitHub, I heavily borrowed many of its ideas)

Hello HN'ers,

I wanted an easier way to search for users of HackerNews, view their submissions and comments.

There are lots of things I wanted to include, but just wanted to get this out there to get some feedback. Would love to hear what you guys think.

Note : I think there was a similar site a few years ago called "hackernewser" - I'm not sure what happened to it because it now gives an error. Anyway, this project was partially inspired by that.

Hello. I'm Eric and I run http://sideprojectors.com

Thanks for listing it on your article.

I suppose unlike other sites, SideProjectors is completely free, so no cost for people to listing it and selling it.

Then the immediate question is "how do you make money?".

Well, I'm a developer and I run other businesses so, SideProjectors is... really my side project. And it has been for almost 4 or 5 years.

I started SideProjectors at a local hackathon where we won a prize from Freelancer! and it all started from there. It receives a constant flow of projects each day and a number of projects have been sold since it started.

In terms of getting the most amount of exposure, I think personally, the most important thing is providing as much detail as possible. It's likely to be featured on the front page, it will show people that you are serious about the project and if not being sold, people will at least message you asking many follow-up questions.

I've been meaning to add a bunch of features to SideProjectors, so hopefully it'll continue to improve!

I digress... but surely they could have selected a better photo of her in their article.

60-100!! That's (personally) so many. How do you know which tab is which and where it is? My colleague has about 20 or 30 tabs open on Chrome and each time he wants me to look over his chrome for any debugging purpose, I get frusrated that I can't find where the right tab is! (I'm assuming there is a better tab management tool out there).

Congrats!

So what do you think?

About using Polymer I mean. :)

Would love to get some insight as to how the experience was learning and building something in Polymer. I haven't heard much of Polymer lately.

Webflow is.... absolutely amazing. I'd love to hear about how you guys built it - e.g. tech stack? challenges? :) Great work!

Oh no. The launched version was... very basic. Originally it was "create your own HN" tool, then I realised I was essentially building a community building tool - surprise, surprise - and that's when various ideas for the features came about. Still long way to go! But we are eating our own dog food by using HelloBox ourselves! This is our Q&A page, built on HelloBox itself - http://self.hellobox.co

About 2 years ago, I posted my side project HelloBox (http://hellobox.co).

Back then, I started as a tool that lets you create your own HackerNews clone. I did this, because every now and then, I was seeing Show HN posts that went like "HackerNews for XYZ". So I thought, I'll create a tool that lets you build your own HN quickly!.

Two years later, I'm still going and it's now grown into a community tool. Still not at the level that I want, but slowly getting there and hopefully monetize it soon.

I'm reading through Nate Silver's Signal vs. Noise book right now - highly recommend it. And this repo is an awesome way to replicate the results that they show on their site (and perhaps some stuff in the book too).

This one does look promising. I didn't know they re-written it for PHP7. But still looks like an early days. Might wait a bit!

Off topic, but curious - Is there any discussion on whether there will be a support for a good concurrent programming in PHP in the future? (e.g. channels in Go & Elixir) - of course, you might say "you're using the wrong tool.."

Are you asking if there is an existing community for SaaS owners? There is a subreddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

But I guess it's not private. GrowthHackers is a more of a general forum for ... well.. growth hackers.. :)

Then there is HelloBox

http://hellobox.co

where you can create a private community - they don't have a directory of all the existing communities, so not sure if SaaS community exists.

There is this recent article.

http://www.addthis.com/academy/how-to-build-an-online-commun...

If you want to start an online community, I'd love to recommend HelloBox [http://www.hellobox.co]. It started as "Create your own HackerNews" and has evolved into a full fledged community management tool.

Cool resource!

you rock.

I run HelloBox - http://www.hellobox.co - a tool to create and manage online communities.

One of the main things that we encourage community owners to do is to let their community grow organically. This means, implementing features where sharing is easy, inviting other members are easy, email notifications etc. It's been really helpful to watch the communities grow this way. Hope that helps.

btw, what were these hyperlocal businesses that failed in the past? [just not familiar with them that's all]

Hey Andy,

Interesting, I'm working in a similar area (but not in crowd funding space) - would love to chat on some of the things you've mentioned in regards to forum software. Do you have a contact point I can reach out to? (me - hello at hellobox.co)

There's a tool called HelloBox

http://www.hellobox.co

Which lets you create your very own HN-like community. Check it out, you can always start one yourself!

I digress, but this site has an interesting comments layout..