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.
Domain Pigeon has been down for the last few days.
Recent visitors to the site saw this uninviting error message:
The error, “
unitialized constant ApplicationController”, was remedied by SSHing into Dreamhost and running the following command:
rake rails:update:application_controller
… which renames application.rb to application_controller.rb
I think Dreamhost updated something on their end which caused the error.
Regardless, its back up — more domains to come shortly.
The second Philly Build Guild meetup was tonight and like the first, we all had a great time.
One notable difference from the Philly.rb meetups is the higher number of entrepreneur-programmers who attend. There was a guy there tonight who talked at length about a Series A round his company was supposed to get, only to fall through at the last minute. Most of my knowledge of that realm is through Paul Graham’s essays and accounts on HackerNews; it was nice to meet someone who has actually gone through it.
One amusing stat which I forgot to mention last time was that someone asked “Is there anyone here who doesn’t have an iPhone?” and only 1 out of the 12 of us had that dubious distinction.
Oh and how in the world do you pronounce Django? Duh-jango? Deh-jango? Jango? What a name.
Matt Mazur 