Just don't do 'login' type work at public wifi :/ is that so hard? Do people not know this already? Did some people ever think it was safe to use public wifi for anything other than general browsing?
Please HN: Stop getting outraged by stuff that doesn't really matter. You're turning into Reddit, and just like them, you will have forgotten all about this by next week, and be on to the next topic you need to be outraged about. It's depressing. Angelgate? No one cares any more. No one should have cared in the first place.
I don't know where you see 'outrage'. I only see someone investigating the security concerns of users of a Starbucks' wifi and being worried that they don't care about their privacy.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"
> " No web developer in their right mind would drop support for IE - no one would hire them - and yet they seem to be fine taking that approach on mobile."
No consumer in their right mind would use IE on a mobile :/
FWIW my webapp is 20% Chrome, 55% Firefox, 19% IE (All mainly desktop users). So dropping support for IE isn't that insane.
Oh no! I definitely want to look into making sure that this one is good enough before I look to make a second. I do have a million more projects I'd like to take on - but each of them has to play out to their maximum potential before I switch to the next.
If this can make $1 in 1 day on an evening's work, how far can I get if it's actually a GOOD site?
Feedback from where people see the areas of concern is useful. I've already read "Load time" in the comments as well as "game quality" and "exclusive content"
Load time is one thing I'd not considered. I think the images must load quickly for me because I've got them all in my browser cache.
I've changed the default sort order of the games so you're much less likely to get 'crap' on your first click than you were when they were random - but I'm working on adding categories as we speak, that way people will be able to find their genre quickly.
how far it gets its going to be related to how people are finding your site, and how much room you have to grow.
if everyone is coming in from search, it depends how many people are searching.
I have a few content sites that drive about $10CPM, but even with #1 organic ranking, I'm limited to about 1500 visitors a month. 95% of my traffic is from search. 99% of my revenue is from people that found my site from search.
generally, as far as adsense goes, the common wisdom is that repeat users do not drive advertising revenue. it's the search hoppers that are the ones that often click on the ads. making the site sticky doesn't necessarily mean more adsense revenue, and here is probably where other advertising mechanisms that require high number of impressions would start to come into play.
affiliate marketing might be something to look into as a supplemental as well, although i'm not sure what that is in your market.
I've got a site that gets ~10,000 uniques per month (www.area51.org), and I still have never found a way to make much money at it. Yes, I've got ads. And yes, I've thought about affiliate marketing. But I wish I could bust out of my boxed thinking and come up with some revenue model that's more compelling.
(On the other hand, the site is self-sustaining; I don't have to think about it much.)
Guess I didn't get the memo. I'm not quite at 500 yet, but it took 12 hours to make a site that makes 250 a day. I'm sure I can easily bring that up to 500 (for instance, the site doesn't even render in IE right now). And I can make another 10 like it.
In response to FreeRadical: It's all about the point of diminishing returns. I spent 6 years on my first site, and it's a huge amount of work with literally thousands of manhours put into it. Just a month ago I launched another site, intended to be a minimum viable product that I can just develop and leave, and it's working out OK thus far. Don't get me wrong, the first is very much successful (2MM+ pageviews a month), but that's thousands of hours I could have put into making multiple other sites, each making a lot less but relatively more.
but it took 12 hours to make a site that makes 250 a day
I'd really like to see the stats on that.
Every time someone tells me that they spent (small amount of hours) on a website that (makes more than $1 a day) they are exaggerating to the extreme by not including advertising, hosting, domain expenses and maintenance time.
I would guess he is not exaggerating in the terms you mention, but what it took to get him there. Reading "12 hours...$250 a day" sounds like he started from zero. He probably didn't.
Nothing. Take a look around his site. He is already an extensive expert in the field of user experience, with numerous successes under his belt. I am sure those successes were the product of a lot of education and years and years of hard work. He already has quite a following on his blog due to those successes. There was a lot that went on before he could start marketing something and sell it right off the bat.
Last summer I saw Michael Franti in concert. You may know him as the overnight success that had the song "Say Hey" if you listen to pop radio at all. (It has been in numerous TV shows, a Corona commercial, It was one of the songs played during Oprah's last show, etc.) I happen to know him as an artist who traveled from festival to festival year in and year out. Sometimes playing to a couple hundred people. Even before success, he was a world traveler, has played with indigenous people in the bush of third world countries with no electricity. He was a successful spoken word performer and has been in several bands that rose and fell long before he current lineup. I think he had released about 10 or 11 albums with various groups with virtually no mainstream success before the album that included Say Hey. At the concert I saw him at, he mentioned the press he was getting at being an overnight success and added, "yeah, with 20 years in the making."
So I guess you could say that Michael probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars for singing that 3 minute song. But there was a lot that went on in his life to get him there.
I was like you for a long time, until two things happened:
1) I met someone who is running a site that took him a few hours to build, cents to run (AppEngine) (plus $20 for two domain names) and makes over $1000/month (yeah, so he's spent more time since then, but not much.)
2) I build a site that cost me $15 to build ($10 domain hosting, $5 - refundable - to join an affiliate program), hours to build (it's basically a blog on Wordpress) and makes me nearly $200/month.
I can't say I'm an expert, but one way to duplicate this is to find a vertical problem domain with a lot of interest (ie, busy forums), find some problem they have (often it's some kind of calculation that people always have trouble with) and build a crappy, ugly tool to do it for them. Make the calculation URL addressable, then put a short note in a forum saying what you've done and follow up by using it in a few discussions.
I've had best responses with Amazon's affiliate program. Made about $130 bucks from something like 5 or 6 blog posts. Hourly rate worth it? Nope. Was it fun? Yep. Basically what I've learned is that Google's dynamic ad placement is the last thing you should try. Putting in an ad (or affiliate link, there are even services that will auto do this with Javascript, so you're users wont see and you don't have to be part of a billion referral programs. Gray hat? Maybe.) that actually targets what you are talking about is so much more effective.
I've written a context sensitive affiliate adserver that serves relevant ads via Javascript. That works reasonably well, but I do need to optimize the ads themselves some.
That is really cool. Have you open sourced it? It's JavaScript in the first place so I know anyone can see it in your site, but it would be cool to track it on Github.
shrug pretty much. The issue is that framework docs are often better than js docs. So instead of people sitting down with a decent js book and learning the right way to do something, they just use a framework.
The fact that pretty much all js frameworks periodically announce speedups of 50%+ should ring alarm bells.
Wow, if you code half as well as you can over-generalize, you must be a JavaScript god. But seriously, frameworks and smaller code libraries should be used when do something useful. If you don't find a framework useful, don't use it. And if you find that you're copying code from project to project, make your own library. This is all pretty simple stuff, I guess you just wanted an excuse to flex your amazing JavaScript ninja muscles on the internets.
Your point about framework docs being better than JS docs is a little puzzling. I think the folks at Mozilla.org would take issue. Plus, there is at least one very excellent JS book ("JavaScript: The Good Part", Crockford) out there to get people started, and most of the silly "Learn JavaScript in 24hours" type books aren't on any JS dev's bookshelf that I've seen (except as a joke).
I can actually code JS fine without a framework. However do I want to keep up to date with all the idiosyncrasies of a growing number of browsers? Do I want to rewrite every function that exists in a framework, such as getting the height of an element or the viewport? No.
The speedups in frameworks are realizations of better ways to do things that a group of programmers came up with - which is almost definitely going to be a better way of doing things outside of a community. That argument would only work if your functions were always as fast as possible at start. Don't forget Chrome was already the fastest browser out there for JS, and they still have improvements of 50%+ in updates.
When exactly did he say "women should not run a startup."?
> "I write in a gender independent style (unlike your comment!)."
That seems fairly silly considering 95%+ of founders are men. Women founders are an edge case. Whether that's how things should be or not is a question for another day IMHO (Ask women why they don't want to be founders), but acknowledging the fact that 95% of founders are men, isn't being sexist.
I think his point is completely valid - if you have a supportive spouse, you can be 50% involved in baby, or you can be 1% involved in baby. If it's 1% then it won't really impact your success in a startup (Although you'll most likely live to regret it).
>> When exactly did he say "women
>> should not run a startup."?
At the end of his message he writes: "For the case of a female entrepreneur I'd say no, you probably shouldn't have a baby and a startup at the same time.)"
>> Women founders are an edge case.
While it might be true that female founders are a small percentage, that doesn't mean they don't deserve the respect of being included in the discussion on equal footing.
They are equally capable of being founders, as such it's best to use gender-neutral language out of respect.
Another way to think of this, is that women wanting to vote was an edge case.
Another way to think of this is that black founders are an "edge case" according to your description. That doesn't mean you should exclude them from the discussion.
The words we choose are very important, and being inclusive costs you nothing but a little bit of empathy and diligence when thinking about the "edge cases."
And yes, his point about having a supportive spouse making it easier is correct. However, in many cases that spouse needs to make money to support the startup spouse--which precludes them being the primary caregiver. Which goes to my point of "start in your 20s, family in your 30s" advice.
> When exactly did he say "women >> should not run a startup."?
At the end of his message he writes: "For the case of a female entrepreneur I'd say no, you probably shouldn't have a baby and a startup at the same time.)"
Do I really have to explain what's wrong with that?
Is it really worth everybody's time for me to come up with a silly analogy like how "Jeff Goldblum cannot carry a sheep and a chainsaw simultaneously" is not the same thing as saying "Jeff Goldblum cannot carry a chainsaw?"
I was originally going to say that, being a linode customer for many years. But, I think it is great that other popular VPS solutions are stepping up. Very nice addition slicehost.
Please HN: Stop getting outraged by stuff that doesn't really matter. You're turning into Reddit, and just like them, you will have forgotten all about this by next week, and be on to the next topic you need to be outraged about. It's depressing. Angelgate? No one cares any more. No one should have cared in the first place.