Yes open sourcing it would be great. If only as example / inspiration. There are tons and tons of open source tooling and articles on building sites and services but rarely full sites with all the 'glue' around the core service that is necessary to actually operate it.
Re/ latency.at: This was probably /newest not the front page. My blog articles didn't work well on HN. But at least when launched I got on the front page. Still really hard to acquire users.