Show HN: My 10 minute non-project: Get a weekly digest of emails from any source
weeklydigest.me
weeklydigest.me
Minute 2: opened tabs in my browser with cheap-domainregistration.com, wufoo.com, addthis.com, uservoice.com, google analytics (I already had those last two open actually)
Minute 3: while waiting for them to finish loading (my internet is down so I'm using my phone at the moment) I copied the template and virtual host config on my server for pimpmysalary.com and tested it on weeklydigest.mockups.decalcms.com
Minutes 4 - 9: added a domain to my DTC config, pasted in the GA, Uservoice and AddThis code, made the Wufoo form and plugged it into my email backend at flymessage.com, and pasted the code in, then updated the text on the page
Minute 10: went through the domain registration process using my saved credit card (okay this may have taken more than a minute).
Were you the guy that wrote that article the other day after I posted "my 15 minute project" doubting the authenticity? These things are just pages copying something I've done before with a Wufoo form. There's nothing there, it's just an idea.
I didn't even have the idea, I got it from this Tweet from Mo Koyfman:
Two feedbacks which aren't exactly an "idea": * The email address font is too big, so I can't see the whole address at once. This has been shown to greatly reduce errors * When I clicked on Feedback and then closed the popup, it loaded the parent page in the popup. Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/6JxxP.png
Thanks for the feedback on the email address! That's a good UX snippet I'd not heard before.
This has me thinking, though, how can I trick myself into opening up a (known) weekly digest email? Might work if it didn't come at the same time always (like, every 4, 5 or 6 days randomly), and the From header was from a person. But, I'm not sure on that.
I got about 30 people sign up and it'll only take me 6 hours or so to do a basic version of this so I think I'm gonna go for it later in the week (maybe Sunday night whilst watching movies :)
The ideas I've had emailed so far are:
1) arbitrary grouping (ie. aggregate multiple source emails into 1 group - so you could have your weekly newsletter digest)
2) choose your interval
3) choose to have it recur based on number of messages
to this end I've just registered emaildigest.me instead of weeklydigest.me and I'm going to do it like this:
groupname+interval+number@emaildigest.me
where interval is hourly,daily,weekly or monthly, groupname is just your own grouping for this (single word tag only) and optionally you can include a number argument which will "purge" the digest.
For example, you could forward all your twitter notifications to:
twitter+daily+40@emaildigest.me
and you'll receive a daily digest of your twitter emails - but if you get 40 in a day you'll receive 2 digests.
I'll also allow you to set your timezone and time of day to receive digests.
What do you reckon?
^I still don't understand why anyone cares how much typing time went into a project - large small cool slick boring complete incomplete pretentious humble whatever - and much less do I understand why that information belongs in the title.
I've made a submission each week over the past three weeks, each with decreasing dev times because, hell, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!
The first was http://cueyoutube.com/ "My Sunday Night Project", then last week was "My 15 minute project: PimpMySalary.com" and now this one isn't even a project, it's just a 10 minute idea.
Whilst my link bait titles are a bit tongue in cheek, there is a real reason I'm doing this: it's therapeutic! I've found that just releasing software serves several useful purposes:
1) It's a fun escape from the "real task" which is building decalcms.com which is a very hard, complex task that's taking a really long time and which I'm worried about monetising (and represents a huge investment of time and money)
2) It's a way of engaging with people and building an audience. Every time I do something like this, I pick up a couple of Twitter followers, or I get to engage with the people that sign up to discuss the product and of course I get the name Working Software in front of a bunch of people
3) It gives some little ideas validation (or not) so that when I feel like a little escape I have something that I can work on and know that there are at least a few people that will care. I'm also building an ORM for SQL lovers at https://github.com/iaindooley/PluSQL/ - I just find that if I don't do something with tangible (or "releasable") results every week then I get very bogged down in the marketing, monetisation and completion of Decal - this helps me regain perspective on life.
4) It's conceivable that if I just so happen to execute one of these right, it'll turn into a real product, who knows.
5) It's good practice for releasing. Putting something out in public is really nerve wracking and I'm not that used to it (same with sending bulk emails). Doing this over and over again desensitises me to it in a way that's kind of quirky and fun, and not offensive (hopefully) to the people involved.
But I'll cool it on the "my 45 second glint in the milkman's eye" titles ;) I've had my fun.
The amount of time usually just doesn't factor into whether the project is worth anything or not. Did you spend 2 minutes on it when you should have spent 20? Or did you spend a weekend when you could have spent a lunch break? Did you think about your project while driving to work every morning for a week and then type it out 10 minutes, or did you truly spend 10 minutes from conception to publishing?
Edit: also yeah I get what you're saying re: the time in the post titles. I was really just poking fun at the whole thing. I'm still going to release things but I'm just going to stop with my ridiculous titles.