dougk16

Nice this is legitimately useful. I dare say I would even pay for a service like this. Not like right now, but once in a blue moon where I have to throw a little website together for something, I'm not a designer and don't really care, just want to copy trends and get a little cheap inspiration. I'm lazy. And I find myself going to a bunch of different sites to see what they do, but you basically did all the leg work already.

Anyway I bookmarked this. I hope it's still running in a year or two when I may need it!

Cool initiative! Once in a while I find myself pondering this question, kind of like I ponder the nature of the universe, in the sense that I know my answer will always be wrong. :)

Seriously though, I have absolutely no idea about this stuff, so much so that I can't even answer the four questions that this website asks me. One might think this financially irresponsible, but I've learned from both HN discussions, and the empathically painful experience watching others in past companies thinking they were going to get rich in an exit, just to see all the money vanish to already-rich outside investors. That is, I've learned to just negotiate a good salary/bonus/work-life-balance and treat the shares as a mystery box that will probably never be opened, or at most have some trinkets inside when it is opened.

That said, I think it would be cool if your website could help guide me on how to answer the four questions you pose. Like what forms to look at, maybe who to email in the company (and how) to get some of this info, how to estimate what the company will sell for, stuff like that.

Another way to look at this, is that anyone who could answer these four questions can probably already estimate their take-home themselves. So perhaps target this more at completely clueless people like myself.

Anyway I hope that's helpful. I definitely want there to be more tools like this out there.

Wow nice! This is hardcore. I wish I had stumbled on this when I first started learning various coffee making techniques. Three pieces of feedback:

- If you search for a grinder like "Capresso 565" nothing happens. Baratza didn't work either. I suggest letting the visitor know that you don't have the config for a particular grinder. Or maybe a dropdown of the configs you do have.

- I was confused at first by the color selection. Like is this for the color of my grinder, or the bean? lol. Don't underestimate tired people who don't read and need coffee right now!

- I think a lot of people will want this site to just tell them what to do. Like I have a Capresso 565 and I'm doing a pour over. What setting do I use? And if there's a few possible settings, tell me how it will affect things going lower or higher. The chart is cool but people mostly just want the answer to their specific question loud and clear.

Just some random thoughts. Overall I love this. Keep at it. I see the other tools on your site. This site could really become a staple in the coffee world. I noticed https://honestcoffeeguide.com/tools didn't have this chart generator listed there.

Good luck!

When I visit Show HN's like this the first thing I want to do is play around with it. The GIF is better than nothing, but my suggestion is to have a little demo where the GIF is.

Also the last question in your FAQ, "How can I make sure you'll stay around?", seems to have a mismatched answer. It seems like the question should be "How much does it cost?".

Overall it looks great. Good work and good luck!

Reminds me of the aguara from the Witcher series. https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/Aguara

I visited the site and wasn't really sure what it was offering, or what/if I have to pay anything. After reading your comment I have a better idea though. Perhaps add some of this copy in your comment to the website itself?

Also your tagline "Build yourself. Build your soft skills." may be better if it's reversed. So "Build your soft skills. Build yourself." It seems like a better causality flow.

Good luck!

> The trick to getting people to sign up is... (you are not going to like this)... a pop-up.

LOL. No sir, I don't like it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDGlN6mluGA

But I am going to put the subscription form at least at the bottom of each post, and think of other ways to get it in front of people. I may consider a popup in the future if I put the work in to make sure people who are already subscribed generally don't see it. Like when they confirm their subscription, set a cookie that will block the popup. Something like that. Or a "don't show me this again" button. I didn't see a popup on your site FWIW.

EDIT: Or duh, just a URL param like show_popup=false in the notification email URL.

Anyway thanks for the feedback. I'm realizing now that I've read your posts in the past and really enjoyed them, so you have another subscriber!

150!? I was so happy about my first 6 subscribers. :)

How do you track visits? As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, if you're using GA I would expect it to be skewed by ad blockers from the HN crowd.

BTW, I think I'm going to put the subscribe by email input field right at the bottom of each blog post like you did, instead of linking to the subscribe page. Thanks for the tip!

The auto-hiding address bar on my 2 Android phones was straight-up glitchy with document scrolling, not the "convenience" behavior. Even other sites on my phone were fine. It was just my site, and I believe I tracked it down the the fixed side bar. When I get rid of that the scrolling was fine.

All your points have really convinced me to give document scrolling another go though. Thanks for the list and the link.

Thanks, your post is much more informative. :) I was writing mine from more of a story-telling perspective, but I'll be following up with a harder post-mortem.

FWIW I estimated visitor count mostly based on a requests per second metric I had handy from GAE console. Also sanity checked against other similar blog posts like ours to see other people's numbers. I'd say 50K was a good lower bound. It was hard to say but I'd be surprised if it was as low as 15K-20K. In my experience Google Analytics numbers can be really deceiving. Especially when you compare them to other tracking methods, and go "huh?". Or your other tracking methods are messed up. Either way! Lies, damn lies, and statistics, as they say. HN audience probably uses ad blockers a lot more too which could potentially really skew things, unless you're doing GA stuff server-side.

I made a conscious choice to not even track visitor count, which I'll expand on...in another blog post!

Good luck with Polar!

Thanks for the tips. I opted for that .content_scroller because when the whole body was scrollable the side menu was really jumpy and glitchy on the Android phones I tested on. It also was doing weird things with the address bar, hiding and showing it in a seemingly random way.

I think you mean `position: fixed` rather than `display: fix` right? In which case the side bar class .side_bar_column already has that. Unless you mean a different class/element?

Anyway looks like I'll have to attack this scroll issue a little more systematically. People usually complain about scrolljacking. I'm doing the absolute opposite, trying to let browsers do their thing themselves, but apparently that's bad too lol. Can't win.

I wasn't aware of this project. Just googled it: http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/index.html

Thanks, I'll be looking into this more.

Thank you I will check that out. Something about the side menu bar throws things off on mobile sometimes.

Oh could you expand? Something wrong on mobile or something? On some Android devices things were wonky but I thought I fixed everything.

The old web??? That's Web 4.0 baby!

In seriousness thanks for poking around and linking that. I'm interested in taking the engine running my site to the next level, think Wordpress or some other site builder with an easy admin console so people can create similar sites with arbitrary content. Let me know if anyone reading this would be interested.

Here's proof that it's at least a generalized engine: http://eagrereader.appspot.com/

Cool stuff. Something always fascinates me about things that are just a few atoms/molecules wide. Especially things you can see and hold in your hand like the edge of a flint knife. Are these nanoribbons something you can see or feel in any way?

Lol in that case the initial sender could be more subtle and send a hint that they specifically are thinking something about the other person, but not what. Then it would be up to the other person to try to match the thought without direct knowledge of what the hashtag is.

I live in a hole so I don't even really know what Tinder is. No offense is possible! Thanks for the compliment :)

Ah lol I didn't figure anyone would read through that!

Thanks, it's mostly gotten negative feedback, which I understand as far as the pure styling (color, font, etc.), but I did spend a lot of time on the "structural" aspects of the layout so they work well on all devices without any real per-screen-size logic. Thanks for noticing! It was a lot harder than it probably looks. I will probably spruce up the styling going forward.

Sweet thanks for that. I like it, very straightforward and to the point. I'm considering how I can "subdivide" Thoughter into little special purpose utilities like for breaking up, hooking up, etc. Maybe I just need to make hashtags more standardized, with a dropdown or something. Much appreciated.

Lol! I was joking about the domain, but I checked your profile and really dig what you're doing. Followed!

Correct, not for making wild hits. And yea getting past spam email anywhere near 100% of the time is basically impossible, but I did seem to be getting into people's junk folders more often than I expected. I'm using https://postmarkapp.com/ FWIW, so going to see if there's different language or format or paygrade or something that will improve my delivery rate.

Very thoughtful comment, thank you. I am going to write up a blog post on why you should not use Thoughter in the first place, or at least only as a "break the ice" mechanism, and I'm going to use a lot of the comments here like yours as fodder.

Ah but one can argue you have revealed your preference, namely that you have no preference, that you'll take the highest base on offer! :)

And note that the other party can check if you sent those other thoughts out if they wanted, so it's socially risky for you to do so ("Ew what a creep, he blasted out all four bases!"). This stuff is fun to think about.

Nice! The comments on that thread are valuable, thanks for sharing. Do you happen to have an instance of it still running somewhere, or screenshots? I would be interested in some specifics of how you approached it since people seem pretty favorable in that thread.

Here's a real minimal stats page I created: https://aytwit.com/stats

Short answer: 22 matches so far from this HN post. I suspect most of these were people testing it out, but who knows maybe there were some real ones? If anybody's reading still, post if you got a legit match! I purposely don't store any thought/person-specific data. Just anonymized and aggregated metrics: https://aytwit.com/sql#event_table

Quite possibly! I never anticipated getting to the front page with anything so I don't know what to expect. Let me know if it eventually came through.

I noticed people having this problem. Not sure what to do about it. :( Going to look into it more.