tinyprojects

Also noticing this - very hard to find software engineers in the UK right now. Apparently we have a major skill shortage[1] - which I'm not surprised by, given how little CS/coding was pushed in schools 5-10 years ago.

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62098767

This is fantastic! Bluebird Sues Cat is a masterpiece.

This is really cool OP - did you create the list of prompts?

I'm working on Paper Website[1], which lets you turn a handwritten journal into a tiny daily blog. I've written nearly 150 posts[2] this way, and I think what's made me so consistent is having an "audience". It sounds weird, but there's ~200 email subscribers to my journal, and it's had nearly 200k page views. Knowing people are reading my stuff motivates me to keep going - I've tried regular journaling before and it just feels like I'm writing into the void.

I'm interested in your prompts because often people don't know what to write about - it's an awesome primer to start.

[1] https://paperwebsite.com [2] https://daily.tinyprojects.dev

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks WIRED has gone down hill a bit recently.

This is great! You've got something here

I write most of my blog posts using Sublime text directly into html code.

There's no spellchecker, it's annoying wrapping paragraphs in <p> tags, but my quality of writing is 10x better.

Something about my weird coder brain is way more comfortable doing my writing as code. I can also tell when a piece of writing is good, because the code looks "nice", the same as if you write a nice elegant function. It's weird to describe but I swear by it.

I tried writing using Google Docs, but my writing ended up being bloated and waffly, and the overall blog post was pretty meh.

Thank you for the kind words!

Hey HN!

I'm Ben, and for the past 18 months I've been building and launching tiny internet projects and documenting the whole process on my blog, Tiny Projects. Today I just launched my 7th project Paper Website.

Paper Website lets you start a tiny website from your notebook - just using pen and paper:

-Write your website/blog using pen & paper

-Take a photo of your page to turn it into a live website

Would love your feedback on this idea (& the landing page) What do you think of it?

Paper Website is also currently live on Product Hunt today. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/paper-website

Thanks for checking it out!

Thank you! I applied as soon as it was announced - I probably waited about 8 months before I eventually got access. Even after that, there's hoops you have to jump through before you can go live. It's incredibly cool tech to have on an API call.

Thanks so much for the feedback on this. There's a bit of a cost associated with paper to webpage conversions (and obviously hosting websites and images) - so I'm quite content with the current pricing.

You can try a Paper Website for 7 days for $1 here: https://paperwebsite.com/signup

Not yet - but I'm working on a tagging/markdown system for the exact reasons you described.

Part of the fun with building tiny projects like this is they're really low stakes. I build them as an mvp in a matter of weeks/months, launch them fast, then get a feel for if I enjoy running them. If I don't, I axe them, or end up selling them - (which is also a fun process).

This means I only really have a couple of things on the go at once, but I can try out way more ideas in a short period of time.

It's using a combination of OCR and GPT-3. GPT-3 is basically being used as a glorified grammar corrector, trained on bad OCR sentences and their correct equivalents. If there's spelling mistakes, crossing outs, or bad OCR going on, GPT-3 will pick it up and correct it into a coherent sentence. There's also a web-based editor that you can go into and edit everything afterwards.

Hey! I'm the creator of Paper Website. This is the seventh tiny project I've built over the past 18 months - I've been documenting the whole process on my blog: https://tinyprojects.dev

I built Paper Website because I wanted a quick and easy way to start a daily blog. I get distracted when I write on my laptop, but I love writing using pen and paper - so I set out to build this.

I'm obviously very biased, but there's something about writing blog posts using pen and paper that is extremely fun and liberating. It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts onto the internet straight from my pen - it reminds me of all the unfocused blogs of the good old days.

I'm also weirdly very consistent at writing now - I've been posting for 40 days straight using this method (here's my daily blog: https://daily.tinyprojects.dev). It's not for everyone, but I love it.

Thanks for submitting this - if you have any questions I'm happy to answer them!

If anyone is running into cold start problems on Firebase, I recently discovered you can add .runWith({minInstances: 1}) to your cloud functions.

It keeps 1 instance running at all times, and for the most part completely gets rid of cold starts. You have to pay a small cost each month (a few dollars), but its worth it on valuable functions that result in conversions, e.g. loading a Stripe checkout.

Oculus is also down

I've built a service that lets you create a micro-blog from a paper journal: https://paperwebsite.com/

It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts on the internet straight from my pen, which sounds similar to the "unfocused blogs" the author was talking about.

Perhaps in this highly edited, Instagram world we now live in - the raw, unedited nature of a blog is a bit more scary. I still love them though.

Here's my blog if you're interested: https://daily.tinyprojects.dev/

Yeah I'm planning to add more languages in the future - as long as the characters are English-looking (i.e. not Greek, Chinese, Japanese etc.). So I think Catalan should be okay.

I'm a big fan of these tiny minimal websites. I've built something similar lets your create an online blog from your paper journal. I use it daily to write down my thoughts and I'm weirdly very consistent with writing knowing others are reading my stuff. Wondering if OP has noticed the same thing.

https://paperwebsite.com

I've tested it with some pretty "awful" handwriting examples from /r/handwriting and it's surprisingly good (think tiny doctor scribbles). Have a go and let me know what you think, it's totally free to try.

Thanks for submitting it! It's free to try out, so throw your handwriting at it and see. I've leveraged GPT3 so it automagically fixes errors that OCR produces.

I've built a service that lets your create an online blog from your paper journal. I use it daily, and I find I'm a lot more consistent with journaling knowing others are reading my writing. I also write way more without all the tech distractions:

https://paperwebsite.com

Everyone is missing the point. This is the start of a major battle between two tech juggernauts. One look at the Facebook ads manager will show you Facebook is very scared about this privacy update and trying to do everything in their power to mitigate it.

Apple is the gatekeeper and Facebook can't do anything about it. Their dominant revenue stream is about to be strangled.

I think Zuckerberg realizes he is screwed in the long run, and only his bet on VR with Oculus will save him.

Really enjoyed this, thanks for sharing!

.kz is the main extension I've opted for.

Experimented with quite a few. GoDaddy didn't believe emoji domains existed. .fm keep their emoji domains hostage and ask for $5k/domain. Freenom is totally unreliable. In the end I used ps.kz

Hi HN

I'm 25 year old developer from England trying to get better at building & launching all the product ideas I have written down in my phone. Mailoji is the sixth project I've built as part of my Tiny Projects mission.

Over Christmas I started tinkering around with emoji domains, which got me wondering - wouldn't it be cool if you could have an emoji email address like elon@[rocket-emoji]?

After a month of experimentation, and obtaining 250+ emoji domain names, I'm proud to launch Mailoji!

A Mailoji is just a normal email address like the one you have now. However, instead of your email address ending with @gmail or @yahoo, a mailoji email address ends with an emoji.

You can send emails to an emoji email address from most major email clients and they simply get forwarded to your regular email.

Mailojis are fun, and a bit silly, but they can really add a futuristic flair to anything. They're great for marketing and really stand out.

This was a really fun build, If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them!

Ben

Also wrote about building this website here: https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/earlyname

Hey HN. I'm always trying out new apps, games & websites so I can snap up my name @ben as a handle, just in case the product gets big. Therefore, I created a product that lets you track your ideal username on new platforms. Would be great to hear your thoughts!