OK Y Combinator, I've been working on my online startup for 4 months.. comments? | Hacker News Reader

OK Y Combinator, I've been working on my online startup for 4 months.. comments?

postmyday.com

4 pointsvirtuexru9 comments

My first thought is that it is exceedingly similar to Twitter. What features do you have to distinguish yourself (other than no 140 character limit)?

I personally really prefer sites that keep their header/introduction comments really minimal (I think twitter.com does a reasonable job of this). Overall at the moment your site reminds me of a visually modified php forum.

I keep seeing smart people using php to create their web apps, and I still don't understand why. Creating this app in Django or Rails would take days instead of months, and would likely more flexible to boot. I continue to wonder if I am missing something. Perhaps you are using a php framework and I am sufficiently uneducated about php to notice.

Honestly though, its great that you're out there building something, and I hope things go well for you. Simplify, simplify, simplify the visual components and distinguish, distinguish from Twitter (and from a forum), and you will be on the way to making something people want to use.

Don't assume that everyone who uses PHP don't use a framework. Anyone who uses a PHP framework can get similar development speed as someone who uses Django/Rails.

There's a reason why smart people uses PHP instead of Rails: Most notably it's proven to scale (Yahoo, Facebook). I have personally tried Rails and love it to bits. But the performance issue is not worth it. In the end, i wrote my own stripped down Rails-like framework in PHP in 1 week and migrated the app in a few days. Performance boost was very noticeable. (Avg page loading time dropped from 1.5 secs to 0.3s)

And to those anti-PHP fascists, yes it's possible to write neat PHP code. There is no scattered SQL in my app since i follow Rails' MVC structure. And since I code "functionally" and don't use PHP OO features, so its half-baked object system doesn't bother me.

I don't mean pure functional. I mean i use lots of functions instead of object methods. I don't like mixing data with functions.

I explicitly stated in my post that I was unsure if he was using a php framework. I try to avoid unfounded assumptions, although I certainly make them.

Scaling can be overemphasized: it doesn't matter if it scales well if it doesn't work. Beyond that, Rails and Django both have sites getting hit with huge quantities of requests. Beyond that, many of the issues with scaling are database issues, not framework issues. As such you will have those same database issues regardless of the framework you chose.

I see scaling well on a Django site as being simpler than scaling well on php. Django has a potent caching system that is easy to activate (the creators of Django also created memcached, so the integration is exceptionally well done, but you can also cache to files, a database, etc), and it can be configured to cache at the level of granularity required (specific db queries, entire pages, components of pages, only for users who are not logged it, etc).

I have no doubt there are reasons to be using php over rails or django, but I don't think that scaling is one of them.

Finally, writing your own framework is the antithesis of doing something that scales well: your company and your programmers also have to scale along with your software.

The issue with Rails for me wasn't the database bottleneck. It was the ActiveRecord. It was using far too much memory and was taking up the bulk of the page loading time. After i migrated the app to my php framework, I downgraded to from a 2GBz 1GB RAM server to a 2GHz 512MB RAM server and i still get a performance boost. Running the rails app on the 512MB server was painfully slow.

Writing your own framework is a good compromise if it can give you that performance boost that the other frameworks can't give you. I've tried the other PHP frameworks and the best page loading time i got was 0.9s.

Code Igniter is a pretty good framework for php. Much better than Cake as it doesn't sport so much "magic" behind the scenes.

+ The domain name + the descriptive text didn't work for me. I couldn't understand what the site was about very quickly. Maybe you could create a tagline, and put it under your logo? That's such a standard that it's really intuitive and reassuring.

"PostMyDay.com -- Rant and rave about your day!"

Or whatever..

+ I think you could cut back on the ads a bit. They're distracting and it's not like you have traffic to monetize yet.

+ I love smallcaps font too, but I think you're overusing it.

+ Maybe you can reduce the registration page. Not ask for any information you don't absolutely need. Make it less work to signup.

+ Top left front page login box is rendering incorrectly for me. Password: is above input but Email: is to the left of input.

+ Your use of the color red is a bit alarming. I see red and I think error/problem. Maybe make that stuff orangered or otherwise more mild?

+ As for the concept I think the biggest weakness is: Why do I need this thing? Maybe I'd like to bitch about my day, but why would I want to do it on here?

+ Maybe you could ask "What time do you get off?" and send an email to users everyday before or after they leave work asking "How was your day?". Send a link to update their page or accept their response email as a post?

I like the concept. It does resemble twitter in some aspects, but you can differentiate it somehow to increase your chances of success. Some other notes about the design:

- Simplify. It looks busy. - Get assistance from a web designer to help with the layout and colors. - Don't put ads on the home page. - Even on the other pages, use less ads. Especially lose the flashy banners. Why does the registration page have a big flashy banner at the top?

Good luck.

The main text on the FAQ page is too small. It might be nice to make it a little more friendly in tone too, less like a manual. Suggest the profile image doesn't have to be 50x50; let them upload anything under a certain declared number of bytes then you scale it and throw away the upload.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com