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Show HN: Phasedust SMS Microblog

phasedust.com

1 pointaparks5175 comments

Hey, HN friends. I was thinking a lot about The Old Web when I built this, so maybe some of that sentiment came through, but I tried not to make it so quirky that folks wouldn’t get it.

I’ve been trying this out with friends and family for a couple of weeks. Some things we like about it: no setup or signup, it’s fast and snappy, it doesn’t demand or abuse attention. I guess the third one would keep it from ever being big, but maybe that’s fine. I think I’d rather make something nice than something big.

Some things I’m still thinking about: image scaling and optimization, discovery (search? hashtags? web-rings?).

I’d love to have your thoughts and perspectives. Is it something you can see yourself enjoying? Why or why not? What would you add or take away?

This is cool and just the right amount of functional!

Suggested features:

- Custom URLs (perhaps for a fee?)

- RSS for blogs would enable linking to everything from Mailchimp to RSS readers

- Customizable colors?

I didn't know about Mailchimp's RSS-to-email, that's pretty cool! I've worked with RSS before; I think it would be pretty straightforward to add.

Colors make sense. Maybe whole themes to pick from?

For custom URLs are you thinking like a custom domain or just the path?

Thank you for the feedback! I really appreciate it :)

Custom domains seems like a lot of work, I think just the path would be nifty!

I wouldn't be opposed to whole themes, but even just being able to change the background color would be a nice small touch. Maybe you could even do that over SMS? Perhaps forward slashes like in IRC?

I assume you're doing something along the lines of hashing the incoming phone number right now which is a nifty way to reduce overhead!

Yep, I keep a hash of the incoming number and associate that with the path. The path itself is not based on the hash, so it can't leak information that way and as a pleasant side-effect it wouldn't be hard to make customizable.

I think some kind of command over SMS is a good idea for setting settings. I guess if the settings got too complicated, maybe a command to send back a link to a settings page. But I think I'd rather not let it get too complicated.

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