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Comment by jfi | Hacker News Reader

so a subscriber could get an email with a link to the current pup? I'd suspect not many people would want an email from me every hour. perhaps making it easy to toggle on / off would make that option more desirable? I could also integrate the site better with @hourlypuppy on tw. thoughts?

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Some digital picture frames will accept an RSS feed. Why not make your site able to automatically update such a frame every hour?

Are there any companies out there offering RSS based image feeds, intended for such devices? One can imagine a digital frame hanging on a wall and the owner can subscribe to themed RSS streams. Owners might be householders, or companies looking for attractive wall art. A set of free streams could be offered, based on the Commons. There could also be paid or ad supported streams, based on proprietary images.

that's be pretty awesome. I know of the "rent physical art" services, but none that do what you described.

rss: http://hourlypuppy.com/feed (raw) http://feeds.feedburner.com/hourlypuppy (feedburner)

If you use HTML email, you can check if the last one was viewed -- and wait until it has before sending out a new email. A person might get 5 in an afternoon and one overnight.

ah brilliant. I like that

The email would preferably contain the image itself - an hourly shot of happiness. On my own site, I offer hourly/daily options for alerts, and a surprising percentage opt for hourly - I think you could do the same. It would get expensive using a third party mailing service like sendgrid - just sending mail from your server via Exim is pretty easy and costs nothing extra.

I have a feeling you could get a surprising number of subscribers, especially since the puppies would be super-forwardable...

Maybe have it send them a daily email with links and thumbnails of the past 24 puppies.

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