Tell HN: November App Launch - Previous Look | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: November App Launch - Previous Look

1 pointww5203 comments

Hi fellow hackers, here's my app for the November App Launching event. Please take a look and I appreciate any feedback.

The app url is http://www.previouslook.com. The app makes it easy to look back at the snapshots of popular web pages over time.

It is inspired by Reddit Snapshot and Hacker Slide. When I saw those, I thought they are very cool in presenting time-based data. I wish they can do more. They would help a lot for the newest submission section of HN or Reddit by making it easy to quickly browse the content over time. Since there's an November App event, I decided to do a generalized version in November that can snapshot different websites and different pages.

Some sample HN pages: http://www.previouslook.com/hnews, http://www.previouslook.com/hnews/new, http://www.previouslook.com/hnews/ask

Clickable links:

http://www.previouslook.com

http://www.previouslook.com/hnews

http://www.previouslook.com/hnews/new

http://www.previouslook.com/hnews/ask

I like the concept, good luck fleshing it out and adding content & dealing with the storage, etc.

If you aren't already, you can use the visual metaphor and farm data from here : http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, adding content is a high priority. So far it's a proof of concept with couple sites. A big part of the app was the backend crawling infrastructure. I want to make it easy to crawl new site. Now new site crawling can be defined in couple hours. Similar pages within a site can be done in minutes, like the subreddits or the digg categories. There's plan to open up the backend to allow anyone to define crawling for any site.

Storage is so far under control since I'm not as ambitious as Way Back Machine to archive the whole internet. It might be a problem once I open up to allow anyone to define crawling.

Good idea for applying the UI to Way Back Machine's data. I'll look into that. Thanks.

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