June – 2010 – Matt Mazur

I received the following email last week:

I am a fellow hacker-news reader, and just wanted to share with you this weekend project i did a few weeks back: hntrends.timepurge.com

This is basically a javascript (Raphaeljs) port of the flash frontend you have at hntrends.com.This was done as a personal learning exercise for Raphaeljs JavaScript library. There is a little python code at hntrends.timepurge.com/fetchdata that fetches your json data (Not set as a cron job. Just to create local snapshot manually).

Hope you like it.

My best wishes to you for the success of Preceden.
-Fenin.

With his permission, I’m posting it here for you all to check out. View it at hntrends.timepurge.com. To view the original version, visit hntrends.com.

It’s amazing how closely it resembles the original version. When I first loaded it I immediately right clicked the graph to ensure that I was actually looking at JavaScript and not Flash. I was showing off his version last night to a few folks at a Philadelphia Hackathon meetup and actually mixed up my site with his a few times because they look so similar.

A side by side comparison (click to view full image):

(With libraries like RaphaelJS and the advent of HTML5, you’ve got to wonder what the state of Flash is going to be in a few years. Outlook doesn’t look so good.)

Fenin, well done sir.

Comments on HackerNews here.

Get as many distribution channels as possible – There is some weird sense that if you build something they will just come. That a few “like”+retweet buttons and emails to editor@techcrunch.com will make your traffic explode + grow consistently. It fucking won’t. Get as many distribution channels as possible. Each one by itself may not be large, but if you have many it starts to add up. It also diversifies your risk.

– Jason Baptiste

On that note, I had this brilliant idea about three weeks ago: as a reminder to myself to email bloggers as part of Preceden‘s marketing efforts, I would keep track of how many bloggers I emailed on the dry erase board next to my desk.

I started on the 6th; today is the 21st:

It’s not that it’s a very hard or time consuming task; I just find it incredibly mind numbing. Every time I sit down to actually email someone, I always wind up switching over to TextMate within 30 seconds to resume programming. Jason’s right though: building it is not enough. The internet is a big, big, BIG place and like it or not, you are just a drop in the bucket.

Here’s to the next three weeks.