Frustrated with the growing length of the navigation bar on the right, I made some changes.
Before:
After:
This was largely inspired by Fred Wilson’s AVC blog, which was designed by Nathan Bowers.
I postponed writing the little bio snippet for a long time mostly because I had no idea what to say. Those 35 words, believe it or not, took about two hours to get right and knowing me, they’ll probably change completely within a week. I think the extra color adds a nice touch too.
HNTrends makes it debut on HackerNews
Cross-posted form the HackerNews thread:
The idea for HNTrends has been bouncing around in my head for about a year as one of those man-I-wish-I-had-more-free-time-type side projects. I recently decided to take up learning Flash and ActionScript and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to build it.
It’s fairly straight forward: A Python script scrapes HackerNews every 15 minutes and saves the data in a MySQL database. A PHP script queries the database and outputs the the last five hours worth headlines as neatly-formatted JSON data, which the chart grabs and plots.
The older, less trendy news items are rendered with a slight transparency in order to reduce the chart’s business. You can hover over any of the lines to see it in greater detail. Also, if you click any of the points it’ll take you to the comments. The links on the right take you to the actual news articles.
Hope you like it. Let me know if you have any suggestions
Launching is exhilarating.
Matt Mazur 