Learning from my web app 23 visits at a time | Hacker News Reader

Learning from my web app 23 visits at a time

juanreyero.com

59 pointsjuanre40 comments

Not sure if this is the right place to tell you this, but no one wants to buy a pdf of a star chart. If I want a computer star chart I'll use a program to generate one live. It might not be as pretty as yours, but it's interactive.

Now if you actually printed large (huge?) format posters of the star chart you would have a market.

People would love to print a start chart as visible in a specific special place and time. It would be a great gift for weddings, birthdays, graduation, etc.

I agree. Maybe you should highlight the "special place and time" aspect, and also you could see if it's possibile to get a deal with some online printing service (i hope some have API) so people can directly order the printed chart.

A preview, as said by other user, would be good (and also the free share-on-FB feature could be useful to spread the word of your site)

Thanks, I'll certainly check into the hardcopy options. The preview is there, although from what I gather in a totally non-obvious way :-)

Thank you for the suggestion. I've thought about setting up an agreement with a print shop, where I can send the PDF or PS to them and they do the printing and sending. But before going that route I wanted to figure out if anybody would want a personalized star chart to start with. Looks like I need to look seriously into it.

Check http://blogalia.com/

There are some professional astronomers blogging over there, doing divulgation. They might be interested. At the very least, they will link the site.

Thanks for the mention! (I'm the founder of Blogalia :)

IMHO, greaterskies.com is interesting as a project, but:

- I don't think anyone will pay for simple visual star charts: there are free sites, free desktop programs and free tablet/mobile apps out there.

- If not for visual, but deep sky: there is 3Atlas from José R. Torres (9, 11 and 13 mag sky atlas): http://www.uv.es/jrtorres/tools.html Available for free in PDF.

- The marketing problem: find your tribe! There are some forums, like cloudynights.com (or http://www.asociacionhubble.org/portal/index.php/foro in Spanish), but this are mostly for dedicated observers.

My 2 cents.

Let me buy a nice large star chart on quality paper with fulfillment via Amazon.

Yes customization is good, but just the star chart itself would be a cool present for a kid.

Less space than a Nomad, no wireless. Lame.

For those who don't get it, this is the slashdot review when Apple released the iPod. It's fair to say that the techies with their feature lists completely mispredicted the biggest music player of the decade.

Likewise, just because you as a programmer can do something like "just use a programme", doesn't mean that everyone can do it. There are people out there who can't "just use a programme"

Thanks for this article!

I had a comparable experience last week launching an online Markdown editor:

http://akaya.me

and nobody noticed, as I blogged about it here:

http://blog.medusis.com/all-quiet-on-the-western-front-silen...

But I don't think you're right when you say "it's possible that nobody wants what greaterskies offers today. And most of the features that I've been adding for the last week are probably irrelevant." Well, it's possible, yes, but you don't know that one way or the other.

Nothing happened because nobody saw your announcement (or mine); nobody saw it because HN gets hit by a deluge of posts at any time of the day, and luck has a big part in deciding which ones don't sink immediately. (Time of day matters, but time of week matters also; I since noticed that slow days (Sundays esp.) are better for the "Show HN" type of message.)

I think what we need are two things:

- on the functional side, beta-testers that are dependable (as opposed to casual); maybe that means they're paid, but maybe we can do with "honest friends"

- on the marketing side, a story, of which your post is a start (I'm still looking for mine).

Don't give up! and please keep us posted.

I wish you posted this 3 hours ago, I just spent the last 3 hours ripping markdown out of my code and replacing it with CKEditor and an HTML sanitizer because I couldn't find a good editor.

I am looking for a markdown editor like this for sometime. You can add a "distraction-free" mode and perhaps place textarea and preview side by side.

Remembering name is harder; quiet heads? :) Maybe, Final Markdown? Markdownable? MerciMarkdown?

I need your tool frequently threading Markdown.

'Akaya now, is it more memorable?

finalmarkdown.com isn't available, and it would be a bit pretentious (although the reference to Queen is cool); mercimarkdown.com is funny and since it was available I registered it. I'll see if I do a full redesign with it...

Thanks for building Akayame bambax. Pretty neat.

A few comments:

1) Please add one or more licenses so developers can include Akayame in their projects with confidence. A couple of examples:

http://jquery.org/license/

https://github.com/jquery/sizzle/blob/master/LICENSE

2) The footer and menu are below the fold in my browsers in the Converter and Editor views so I need to scroll to see the menu and "Yet Another Markdown Editor" text.

3) The footer could do with improved styling : text overlaps the border, bullets and links use default styles. Minor quibbles but improvements would improve the professionalism of the site. Image here:

http://autoreverse.s3.amazonaws.com/2011006_Akayame_footer.j...

4) Landing page does not convey to the visitors what the site is about (and"Yet Another Markdown Editor" is below the fold).

5) Adding a page or two with keyword rich text explaining the project ("jQuery powered online Markdown editor") and background ("inspired by other Showdown online Markdown editor projects") could help with search engines listings.

6) Have you considered hosting the code on Github for increased exposure and link juice?

Many thanks for your comments (we're pretty OT now and I'm sorry to piggyback on greaterskies story).

I'm clearly design-challenged but I don't really know what to do about it (except hiring someone who, unlike me, knows what they're doing; but I don't have the cash). But I did test the footer in many browsers and am surprised to see that it can fall below the fold; I guess I'll test again.

What do you mean by "developers can include Akayame in their projects": right now it's just a webapp, the code isn't available and there's no API, so why would you need a licence?

(The code would need some serious cleaning before being shown publicly; as for an API I don't think it's applicable, although I'm working on a sister project to transform HTML to clean HTML and/or Markdown, with a public API).

I like the idea. I am trying to buy a chart for my wedding date in Pittsburgh, but the download after preview fails to happen. I using Chrome on a Mac. Maybe I am using it wrong. I don't know.

Anyway, here are my feature requests:

1) See what a chart looks like immediately. Can be pre-generated. (Someone already said this in a previous comment)

2) Would like to annotate my chart with notes or custom title, subtitle, etc

3) Share chart on various social media sites as an interactive widget or simply a photo. (Someone already said this in a previous comment)

4) Print to a T-shirt or mug on zazzle.com or other T-shirt site (you can probably make money here as an affiliate).

5) This is a little crazy, but maybe overlay my wedding gift registry items on top of the star chart so that people can buy our wedding registry items in a cool and interactive way instead of navigating through multiple totally crappy wedding registry sites. (again you can probably make money as an affiliate here)... it's just an idea...

Good luck with the project!

Thanks for the ideas!

The problem with the preview request is that the server is struggling. Beefing it up right now on AWS.

Two suggestions:

1. After filling in the info I started looking where to click next and was a bit surprised that it is above to the left of the map, I think you have to make the interface flow a bit more intuitive. 2. It would be great to see the image in small format before I pay.

Thank you very much for the feedback. Maybe I should put the next click to the right? I'll certainly try it out. As for your second point, you should be able to see the image in large format before paying: a link appears after you have input the map data where you can ask for a preview, and a full-sized one will be created for you.

Thanks. A little tip: Make the star chart in the blog link to http://greaterskies.com/ . I clicked it more than once before I realized I had to find the link in the text.

Done. Thanks.

The traffic from HN has reduced my previous statistics to noise, so I've thought I'd as well implement some of the feedback I've got, online now. Also, the server is suffering and I cannot try to set load balancing because I need to run to a meeting (why didn't I before?). So I've added feedback to let you know at which steps the server is struggling, asking for some patience.

Thanks everybody!

Might be attractive for people celebrating anniversaries or having kids. Sort of a cosmic snapshot of that particular time and place.

I like the cosmic snapshot approach, maybe with the rest of the cosmos left as an exercise for the reader.

Awesome job man!

Ease of use requests for the star chart page:

  1. GeoIP db to get current location
  2. Autofill location
  3. autofill date
  4. autofill local time

GEO IP: http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/03/31/3-free-ways-to-ge...

Viral ideas:

  1. Allow creation of star charts from FB data (eg. City / DOB)
  2. Add FB share link.
  3. People buy star charts for friends

It pains me that people believe in this psuedo-science, but will make you money ideas:

  1. Allow some kind of astrological star chart that is 
     tangentially related to their astrological sign.
  2. Pair with FB (eg. Fred's Libra Starchart)

Btw, yesterday was my birthday and if I could have posted this on my wall it would have been awesome. (Not the astrology part)

Thanks! And thank you for the pointer to the geoip options. I know I should look into astrology, but it kind of pains me. And I'll check out FB pairing as well.

Yeah, I'd put the astrology one up on a separate domain.

For the astrology thing you may want to see if you can join some kind of affiliate program and put a link in the PDF might pay more in aggregate giving them away for free.

Awesome project! I do have one feature request (preferably before my wife's birthday...), which is the ability to add custom text as a heading of some kind.

For example, I would be ordering a picture of the night sky over Rome on a particular night, and it would be nice if the poster said so - not everyone knows Rome's lat./long. off by heart.

Sure, I'll add it. Should it appear at the top, encircling the map, or at the bottom?

Thanks for the feedback!

A star chart of the Star Wars "Universe" would be the best thing ever. (and I know there would be licensing issues)

Also, what about EVE Online players, would it be cool to offer them some kind of print out?

(Think of any other persistent games, or imaginary universes).

Think of things people are passionate about.

I think this is great, but I ain't paying for anything I can't see. The flow should be Enter Location -> Image Preview -> Share-on-FB or Pay-to-Print. That's your MVP. Hard-Code it for a few locations or show some random image previews.

My bad. Your product does everything, but in a totally non-obvious way. Please do yourself a favour and read the book "Don't make me think"

Yep, I kind of know I am obvious-challenged. Thanks for the suggestion.

Great site, but I found the interface very confusing. It took me ages to figure out what to do next at every step. The resizing text is an ok idea, but currently it's more distracting than guiding. Hope that's helpful. :)

Thanks. Maybe I could make arrows appear, or something. Need to try it out.

How is the chart supposed to be interpreted? Is it me looking up at the sky on a particular night seeing a a 360-degree view of the stars?

Also, how are future positions determined?

great article - impressive what you've done there (connecting all the different pieces, including Common Lisp and AWS!!). love the charts too!

thanks for sharing Juan. I think HN managed to bring http://greaterskies.com/ down.

Indeed. And I cannot figure out how to scale it up without changing the DNS to point to a load balancer. Oh well.

And back again. It should stand better now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com