Thrutched, One month later | Hacker News Reader

Thrutched, One month later

thrutched.com

14 pointscsytan11 comments

It's been one month since I launched my climbing news website, so I thought I'd give those that wished me well an update (and possibly gain some new users too ;).

First thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1915280

Second thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1924941

What's happened since then:

- Two redesigns

- Over 80 topic posts (57 of which were from me)

- Approx 50 unique visitors/day

- Defeated: 2 spammers

Traffic: http://i.imgur.com/7Oo29.png

Visitors: http://i.imgur.com/jM5UM.png

The first and second traffic peaks are from the HN posts. The third peak was when I cross-posted an article to various climbing forums. I got criticized heavily for it, but it was a good learning experience.

I think it's important to get periodic bursts of traffic from other sites, but at the end of the day, regular contributors are the most important, especially when setting the tone of the community.

As one of your unique daily visitors I say thanks for making this. I have passed it on to all my climbing friends and posted it on Facebook. I like the clean interface and high quality content thus far. Are you planning to throw ads on this at some point?

PS- This link is broken: http://www.thrutched.com/password_reset

Thanks for visiting!

No plans to put ads on it now. I'm doing this cause I love working on it.

Not to say that I wouldn't put a small ad up if it ever grew large, but in the list of priorities, making money is at the far bottom.

I have a long term goal of building a high quality community like HN (but with line breaks).

That's cool. If you had any interest in a banner exchange let me know. One of my several side projects is a climbing related site. Perhaps we can help each other out? If you have any interest hit me up at the e-mail in my profile.

Cool! I've gotten some great advice talking to Matt from http://bouldr.net/ so that sounds swell.

Password reset should be working now. Thanks for the bug report.

Might I suggest adding a Facebook "Like" button to the page? I found that the couple of people that "like" it each day via your button both make the site's growth look stronger (the number displayed goes up) as well as traffic increases.

I noticed a significant improvement on traffic to one of my sites after adding the button, so much so that I'd advocate it for any growing community.

(No, I don't work for Facebook)

Awesome. Check back tomorrow :)

Edit: added

This is really cool. As an aside, is it me, or are a disproportionate number of HN-ers also climbers (myself included)? I've seen at least a few threads about climbing the past few weeks, can't say the same for any other sport.

I'd be willing to bet there are quite a few kayakers lurking as well.

awesome, never knew about the site. thanks for posting.

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