4 ms·

Helpmanual.io is my first attempt at passive income. Launched 6 weeks ago and traffic is building nicely. There's still a fair bit to do but the delight of site

by scolvin 10y ago

Helpmanual.io is my first attempt at passive income. Launched 6 weeks ago and traffic is building nicely. There's still a fair bit to do but the delight of sites like this is you can make improvements when you want. Shame that ad income is less than it used to be but we'll see how it gets on. https://helpmanual.io https://helpmanual.io

soft_dev_person 10y ago
That's nifty and cute. How do you go about promoting and building traffic for this kind of site?
- OJFord 10y ago
  > How do you go about promoting and building traffic for this kind of site? Well, parent posted it here and got you interested!
  - scolvin 10y ago
    Well yes, a bit of that. :-) I'm kind of relying on Google to list it organically as man pages are something people search for a lot.
erikb 10y ago
It seems to be a searchable man page index. What does it offer that google+terminal don't offer?
- OJFord 10y ago
  > What does it offer that google+terminal don't offer? Hyperlinks and the "referenced by" section are pretty neat.
- scolvin 10y ago
  Man pages in the terminal are pretty annoying as you can't (easily) search them. By "Google" I presume you mean online indexes of man pages E.g. This site. The other man pages sites are ugly, old and incomplete, despite that done of them rank pretty high on Alexa. I built this site to end up smarter, more modern, easier to use and more complete. Still a work in progress atm.
  - to3m 10y ago
    On Firefox, code examples are sometimes 1-2 pixels longer than their viewport, so you can get a fairly pointless scrollbar. See, e.g., https://helpmanual.io/man3/printf/ https://helpmanual.io/man3/printf/ One suggestion: how about guessing at hyperlinks. For example, there are a few underlined instances of `size_t' in the printf man page. If you ask for the size_t man page, you get the man page for stdint. Suppose I had a device on my desk that could automate this sort of drudgery for me... (I did something like this for my patched version of Bwana: https://bitbucket.org/tom_seddon/bwana https://bitbucket.org/tom_seddon/bwana, original: https://www.bruji.com/bwana/ https://www.bruji.com/bwana/ - works well, at least for the OS X man pages. My code only looks for man pages with the exact name, though, since it runs on demand. If you're doing a preprocess to generate all the pages ahead of time then you could perhaps afford to be more thorough.)
  - rovr138 10y ago
    > Man pages in the terminal are pretty annoying as you can't (easily) search them. The content? Type / then your search term.
jonaf 10y ago
One idea where you can distinguish you're in addition to being just better: add commentary/disqus and have some sort of system that aggregated and ranks comments (like stack overflow answers) on each man page. I find that man pages always have all the info I need, except it's often buried or there are surprises, but others' knowledge/experience can really save you from common pitfalls not in the man pages. Just having s crowd-sourced highlighter function of sorts would give you a unique offering among the competing options. You could also augment the see also section. And for marketing, you could have a blog and write about the top BSD tools based on activity, searches, etc, or up-and-comers. You could feature community commentary (like how to best use a tool) and build in some kind of point/reward system. I have more ideas but I'll stop there. Good luck with your project!

by scolvin 10y ago

soft_dev_person 10y ago

That's nifty and cute. How do you go about promoting and building traffic for this kind of site?

OJFord 10y ago
> How do you go about promoting and building traffic for this kind of site? Well, parent posted it here and got you interested!
- scolvin 10y ago
  Well yes, a bit of that. :-) I'm kind of relying on Google to list it organically as man pages are something people search for a lot.

erikb 10y ago

It seems to be a searchable man page index. What does it offer that google+terminal don't offer?

OJFord 10y ago
> What does it offer that google+terminal don't offer? Hyperlinks and the "referenced by" section are pretty neat.
scolvin 10y ago
Man pages in the terminal are pretty annoying as you can't (easily) search them. By "Google" I presume you mean online indexes of man pages E.g. This site. The other man pages sites are ugly, old and incomplete, despite that done of them rank pretty high on Alexa. I built this site to end up smarter, more modern, easier to use and more complete. Still a work in progress atm.
- to3m 10y ago
  On Firefox, code examples are sometimes 1-2 pixels longer than their viewport, so you can get a fairly pointless scrollbar. See, e.g., https://helpmanual.io/man3/printf/ https://helpmanual.io/man3/printf/ One suggestion: how about guessing at hyperlinks. For example, there are a few underlined instances of `size_t' in the printf man page. If you ask for the size_t man page, you get the man page for stdint. Suppose I had a device on my desk that could automate this sort of drudgery for me... (I did something like this for my patched version of Bwana: https://bitbucket.org/tom_seddon/bwana https://bitbucket.org/tom_seddon/bwana, original: https://www.bruji.com/bwana/ https://www.bruji.com/bwana/ - works well, at least for the OS X man pages. My code only looks for man pages with the exact name, though, since it runs on demand. If you're doing a preprocess to generate all the pages ahead of time then you could perhaps afford to be more thorough.)
- rovr138 10y ago
  > Man pages in the terminal are pretty annoying as you can't (easily) search them. The content? Type / then your search term.

jonaf 10y ago

One idea where you can distinguish you're in addition to being just better: add commentary/disqus and have some sort of system that aggregated and ranks comments (like stack overflow answers) on each man page. I find that man pages always have all the info I need, except it's often buried or there are surprises, but others' knowledge/experience can really save you from common pitfalls not in the man pages. Just having s crowd-sourced highlighter function of sorts would give you a unique offering among the competing options. You could also augment the see also section. And for marketing, you could have a blog and write about the top BSD tools based on activity, searches, etc, or up-and-comers. You could feature community commentary (like how to best use a tool) and build in some kind of point/reward system. I have more ideas but I'll stop there. Good luck with your project!