HNWatcher: track keywords and follow users on Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

HNWatcher: track keywords and follow users on Hacker News

hnwatcher.com

29 pointsjulien42119 comments

I've been using this to follow some users whose comments I respect, and it's been a great improvement from loading the hn user comments page all the time. I imagine this is more valuable for startups and marketing managers, but it's been useful me the average hn addict as well :)

Feedback:

- Autofocus on input field in modal windows after clicking "Follow a new HackerNews user".

- Remember my checkbox selection in the same modal window

- Favicon!

- Autofollowing e.g. "pg" could improve onboarding

- Design is not very content focused right now, I would probably switch the middle and right column

- Highlight found keywords in comment text

- Notify/show me if someone replied to one of my comments

- Modify title depending on what is shown (Right now following.php always shows "HackerNews users I follow" even when I have selected a specific one)

Thank you for the feedback Sujan! Be sure we will work on this this week-end :)

PS: we highlight the keywords only when you click on the specific keyword for now.But not on the "All" sub-tab.

Ah I see. Why not? It would be especially useful there.

And I just noticed you remove all linebreaks in the output of comments right now. Intentional or bug? Makes for some quite unstructured reads with e.g. patio11's texts.

No reason, just we did not have the time to do it :) It's on our TODO!

@Sujan done! =)

Perfect, much better. The keywords.php is now actually useful.

Nice feedbacks!

I've been using it for the past week and it's great.

If you wish to get alerts for your brand and receive the HN link while it's hot it's the perfect tool.

"Like any service, we will eventually charge our users."

I use plenty of services which don't charge me......

Hey Fuzzwash,

You are right but unfortunatly, hosting + emails ( via mailgun ) are not free, so at one point we will probably have to charge for the service if we have lots of users. We are not a company and we are not funded, this is a week-end(s) side-project :)

You've created an interesting product, but you may want to give more thought to a monetization strategy. I don't see many paying to use something like this, but it could get some users.

What are you using as the backend/API?

It is partially based on HN Search API [1] and partially based on homemade Ruby scripts.

[1] HNSearch: https://www.hnsearch.com/api

Nice, I'm asking because there was a similar service [1] that stopped working without explanation before and that kinda sucked after getting used to it.

[1] http://hackerfollow.com/

Never heard of it. I will try to get in touch with them to see what happenned.

Very cool stuff! I was waiting for something like that! :)

Quiet nice!

Nice tool ! Luv it !

Reply on news.ycombinator.com