dustyreagan

I'm building a math practice site covering topics from simple arithmetic to second order differential equations. The idea is that to get better at (or intuit) math you have to practice. I'm trying to incorporate some Skinner Box techniques to make studying easier. I hope it's helpful and I'd love to hear your feedback: https://studycounts.com

A math practice website called https://studycounts.com. I’m trying to combine randomly generated math practice problems with addictive Skinner box-ish gaming elements. Skinner box for self improvement is the idea.

I'd hoped to make something for the "lazy developer." I use the service for counts that don't fit in to any of my apps models, because it's easy to create new counts (just change the URL), and because it exposes the count via GET and JSON I can easily implement the count into my dashboard. Mostly I use it for A/B Testing, aka counting impressions and conversions.

I'd also hoped to add additional value with charts, built in A/B Bayesian calculator, and webhooks/callbacks when a count reaches a certain value (yet to be implemented).

But I see your point, and I certainly worry about the market size here.

The catalyst for this project is my frustration with popular tracking and A/B testing products being overly cumbersome. I'm not sure how many developers share my frustration, but my hope is there is a market for a simple RESTful counting and AB testing API.

I created a similar MVP about 4 years ago and dropped the project in favor of another. Since that time I've decided to take another stab at it, this time focusing more on how the API can be used for marketing research.

I hacked this site together to help me purchase gift cards that my friends and family can use easily, and not have to drive out of their way to redeem. I feel like the messaging of what the site does is hard to convey, but I hope you find it useful.

Feedback is most welcome!

Why did you choose to broker through feinternational, vs say flippa?

This is interesting, but I wonder what the results would be if you compared the dog, and baby, to your best friend. In other words, I wonder if the dog would have closer matching results to the baby, or the friend.

Accidental product success, followed by accidental PR success. Half of HN would kill for this kind of luck, and this poor guy doesn't want it... Which makes it even more interesting!

I downloaded my raw data and took screenshots of my results just in case they get shut down. :(

I think it's a brilliant idea. Popular estimator sites are making real passive income, in that there's not much work to be done after launching. The snag is this market is saturated and there is a low barrier to entry to keep competitors out. That said, I've never seen a site take an average of the most popular estimator sites. I think it's a clever angle, and it certainly creates the perception of a more accurate result. I'd use your site over your competitors.

Your challenge is going to be in gaining market share. Meaning, you need to rank high in Google! Or spread virally. That'll be tough, but I think you can do it with this angle.

All Twitter API methods require authentication now-a-days. https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api

Got a source?

That's it! Thanks! :)

Not even kidding, people have suggested I add a "shoot your friends to unfollow them" feature to Friend or Follow as a joke. There's nothing new under the sun.

Great implementation. Maybe default the music to off.

Skewing the data! ;)

Yeah, see I'm kind of torn, because GET just makes it so dang simple. POST requests, though semantically correct, add a small amount of overhead to implementing the counter. I'm not really concerned with spiders, as the URLs are intended to be obscure + robots.txt. In addition, future versions could include simple basic auth for private URLs. Though I intend to keep public URLs around for fun and drive by counting.

Thanks! I appreciate that! :)

I added an IncrementBy and DecrementBy variable you can pass in your POST request, and update the documentation. How's that work for ya'?

I think that's the way to go for the public URLs. I'm going to leave it up to the user to come up with a unique group name though.

Agreed. I updated the site and docs. Thanks! :)

Yeah, ok. I agree with that. I changed incrementing and decrementing operations to POST requests only, and updated the documentation. Thanks for the feedback!

The idea was to make something easier than booting up a database. Personally, I just needed a semi-persistent count that I could discard later. This fit the bill for me, and being able to retrieve the counts via JSON, I can easily add them to my Geckoboard dashboard.

The idea was to launch the proof of concept with public URLs, then if I discovered people were interested, create private URLs. Thing is private URLs require an authentication system, which is fine, but I didn't want to overdevelop the proof-of-concept.

I fixed the link. Thanks! :)

I was doing some usability testing in one of my webapps and needed a simple way to count conversions. There are lots of A/B testing solutions out there, but I just wanted a persistent count I could increment on specific user actions. So I created the ArbitraryCounter.com.

I find it useful, but I'm wondering if anyone else might. What do y'all think?

PS. This is WAY beta, and mainly a proof-of-concept. But I'll continue developing it if there's an interest it.

I wonder if services like this will become more popular?

I'm confused. How is this relevant to the article?

Hmm, think it might be time to get around to backing up my Flickr photos.

Maybe I'm just set in my ways, but I still love flickr. It's how I store my photos online. I certainly don't want to store my photos on Instagram. Though, flickr has missed an opportunity for the way people share spontaneous iPhone pics. A lot of people still use a real camera and upload their pics in batches.

I still use FTP to live update production sites. I do this for my personal blog, and on my projects that don't get much traffic.

It really only becomes a sin when you have a lot of visitors who are relying on your site. For my larger sites, I have a build process. It's all a mater of scale and how much risk is acceptable for your website.

I created a sub-reddit some time ago for bootstrapeprs. Wasn't sure if there was enough demand for it though. http://www.reddit.com/r/bootstrappers/