Yesterday I posted to proggit, hackernews and dzone my little weekend Python/Django project, hackurls.com, providing source code too, and I had unespected results.
I was bored of common feed readers layouts, and I couldn’t use anymore popurls.com that everytime shows billions of not Tech related news and flickering javascript tips.
So I decided to open my own version targeted to nerds and programmer, aggregating HN, proggit, hackaday and so on, to watch in one shot all the news I care. I used it for some days, adjusting little stuff here and there, and I found it very comfortable.
It’s quite amazing, in a day a hackurls got 15000 visits, 9000 unique visitors, 10 Euros of Adsense. I expected 10 visitors…
And people wrote me to tell they like it and yet use it as homepage, or to request new features they would like, or because they just needed help making my source run. A guy asked me if I could sell him the the whole piece of software. Opensource works.
Technically hackurls is just a python script running in crontab every X minutes on a Linode VPS (20$ for one month) that compiles an HTML page with a lots of news and thumbnails images got from feeds. The generated pages are served statically by a cherokee webserver. In this way a can manage a lots of users with a single vps. It costed me totally around 50$ with the domain registration.
Now I’ll try to go on improving the service, listening to users needs. Especially I’m actually trying to collect also programming jobs from many feeds; you can see a preview here: www.hackurls.com/jobs.html .
Soon I’ll include search functionality so you can find old news in all the news sources, and also find hacker jobs in tens of websites.
If you have any suggestion, write me to vuotomeccanico on gmail. Thank you all!
