4 ms·

Thank you :) I put a lot of work into it, but am not getting the traffic I imagined.

petervandijck 16y ago
Time to stop developing (the autosuggest feature is a bit too much I think) and start promoting. Try asking for ideas here :) One idea would be to have some kind of widget I can put on my site. I'd also recommend simplifying the UI, it's a bit overwhelming now. Think Google results page.
- photon_off 16y ago
  What would the widget on your site do? Suggest other website that are similar to yours? Seems kind of counter productive if your goal is to retain visitors. I've toyed with the idea of making a similarity service for publishers, or perhaps a wordpress plug-in. Moreofit would receive a set of URLs, and you could query it with a URL and receive the most similar amongst the set. I imagine this would be very useful for large sites such as SmashingMagazine, where finding similar articles on keyword alone will fail, and the site is so big that manually digging up related articles would be a pain. Instead, just drop in an iframe or script and moreofit will show a list of n most similar articles from your domain (or set of links).
smallegan 16y ago
I like functionality of the site...the design? not so much...I'd put a bit more work into the aesthetics of the site.
grg 16y ago
I agree with the other comments. A simplified UI and some promotion, and the traffic should go up. So it's a great idea for the site. On the other hand, what's different about this site vs, say, clicking on "Similar" in a Google search results page? I'm just curious...if there's certain functionality that's better on moreofit.com, I'd personally be more likely to use your site in the future, rather than just using Google.
- photon_off 16y ago
  Google similar sites generally bring up mundane and often not-so-good results. It answers the question: "What sites have some keywords in common with this one?" Moreofit uses user-generated tags (and their 'weights') to determine matches. The data comes from Delicious and encompasses hundreds of millions of instances of users manually categorizing sites. The data is thus fairly semantic and very accurate. Moreofit answers the question: "which sites have been tagged in a pattern most like this?" which turns out to a much better descriptor of similarity. Thanks for your feedback.. perhaps you could help me out and give me some ideas of how to promote this?
  - grg 16y ago
    Sorry it took me so long to respond; I just noticed your reply to my comment. I like the idea of pulling data from Delicious to determine matches. It gives you a good source of social data, and it solves the "chicken and egg" problem that a site like yours would have if it weren't pulling data from somewhere like Delicious. In the future (once you get your userbase up), you might consider pulling data from other sources, too (Hacker News, Reddit, Digg). I'm not sure how that process would work, exactly, but it's food for thought. As far as promotion, here's a good article that I just saw this week on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610540 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610540 As a general rule of thumb, find people that are already writing articles (blogs or otherwise) on subject matter similar to your site. Use Google News and Technorati.com to find these articles (maybe terms like "social news" would be a good place to start for your purposes). Then, start talking to those authors (in the comments section of their posts, via email/twitter). Once you have a rapport with them, offer to do a guest post on their site, sending a pre-written article that won't take them much time to edit. If your article provides value to their reader base, then it's good for you and them. If it were my site, I'd personally focus on promotion first, and then a streamlined UI later. One quick idea on getting a good design is 99designs.com. It's a great concept on crowdsourcing design. I promise I'm not affiliated with 99Designs in any way--I've just had good luck with using them in the past (I've had a couple of logos designed through their site, and was pleased with the value of the design combined with a low cost).
zampo4 16y ago
For marketing your site, I think you could make a Firefox extension that gives in-browser suggestions for similar sites. That would be so useful. In fact, I believe a browser addon would be the "most convenient form" of this idea. I played around with Firefox extensions three years ago and submitted a very niche addon for fun. Within the first week it received 10,000 downloads and ultimately downloads went up to 100,000. That was only possible because Mozilla would feature newest addons on the front page with no lobbying efforts required on the developer's side. Three years ago, there were a couple of links near the middle of the Mozilla page to the newest addons. Now, there is a link to sort by "recently added" near the top of the page, so visitors are one click away from seeing the most recent. Also, there is a sort by "recently updated" option. I remember people frequently updating and seeing their extensions remain in the "most recent" section. For finding similar sites, I personally use xmarks and similarsites.com. (Fo)xmarks obviously has a firefox extension. Similarsites.com has an extension with around a million downloads; don't know if the chicken came before the egg, though. You could bundle some functionality into your addon like quantcast/alexa/pagerank data push it as an SEO tool. An ironic usage of your website just occurred to me: 1. Use google to find a couple of marketing/seo blogs/websites. 2. Input these websites into moreofit.com to find more marketing/seo sites. 3. Email list of found sites about moreofit.com and how useful it is for marketers. Describe how you found them using moreofit.com.
- photon_off 16y ago
  Sending the link about to marketing/seo sites is a good idea. I suppose it would do them good to encourage people to see what their competition is up to; and even better that you can sort by popularity to give you some insight as to how your more-popular counterparts got where they are. As per the bookmarklet... that's coming shortly. My next project is going to blow up the bookmarklet space.

Time to stop developing (the autosuggest feature is a bit too much I think) and start promoting. Try asking for ideas here :) One idea would be to have some kind of widget I can put on my site. I'd also recommend simplifying the UI, it's a bit overwhelming now. Think Google results page.

photon_off 16y ago
What would the widget on your site do? Suggest other website that are similar to yours? Seems kind of counter productive if your goal is to retain visitors. I've toyed with the idea of making a similarity service for publishers, or perhaps a wordpress plug-in. Moreofit would receive a set of URLs, and you could query it with a URL and receive the most similar amongst the set. I imagine this would be very useful for large sites such as SmashingMagazine, where finding similar articles on keyword alone will fail, and the site is so big that manually digging up related articles would be a pain. Instead, just drop in an iframe or script and moreofit will show a list of n most similar articles from your domain (or set of links).

smallegan 16y ago

I like functionality of the site...the design? not so much...I'd put a bit more work into the aesthetics of the site.

grg 16y ago

I agree with the other comments. A simplified UI and some promotion, and the traffic should go up. So it's a great idea for the site. On the other hand, what's different about this site vs, say, clicking on "Similar" in a Google search results page? I'm just curious...if there's certain functionality that's better on moreofit.com, I'd personally be more likely to use your site in the future, rather than just using Google.

photon_off 16y ago
Google similar sites generally bring up mundane and often not-so-good results. It answers the question: "What sites have some keywords in common with this one?" Moreofit uses user-generated tags (and their 'weights') to determine matches. The data comes from Delicious and encompasses hundreds of millions of instances of users manually categorizing sites. The data is thus fairly semantic and very accurate. Moreofit answers the question: "which sites have been tagged in a pattern most like this?" which turns out to a much better descriptor of similarity. Thanks for your feedback.. perhaps you could help me out and give me some ideas of how to promote this?
- grg 16y ago
  Sorry it took me so long to respond; I just noticed your reply to my comment. I like the idea of pulling data from Delicious to determine matches. It gives you a good source of social data, and it solves the "chicken and egg" problem that a site like yours would have if it weren't pulling data from somewhere like Delicious. In the future (once you get your userbase up), you might consider pulling data from other sources, too (Hacker News, Reddit, Digg). I'm not sure how that process would work, exactly, but it's food for thought. As far as promotion, here's a good article that I just saw this week on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610540 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610540 As a general rule of thumb, find people that are already writing articles (blogs or otherwise) on subject matter similar to your site. Use Google News and Technorati.com to find these articles (maybe terms like "social news" would be a good place to start for your purposes). Then, start talking to those authors (in the comments section of their posts, via email/twitter). Once you have a rapport with them, offer to do a guest post on their site, sending a pre-written article that won't take them much time to edit. If your article provides value to their reader base, then it's good for you and them. If it were my site, I'd personally focus on promotion first, and then a streamlined UI later. One quick idea on getting a good design is 99designs.com. It's a great concept on crowdsourcing design. I promise I'm not affiliated with 99Designs in any way--I've just had good luck with using them in the past (I've had a couple of logos designed through their site, and was pleased with the value of the design combined with a low cost).

zampo4 16y ago

For marketing your site, I think you could make a Firefox extension that gives in-browser suggestions for similar sites. That would be so useful. In fact, I believe a browser addon would be the "most convenient form" of this idea. I played around with Firefox extensions three years ago and submitted a very niche addon for fun. Within the first week it received 10,000 downloads and ultimately downloads went up to 100,000. That was only possible because Mozilla would feature newest addons on the front page with no lobbying efforts required on the developer's side. Three years ago, there were a couple of links near the middle of the Mozilla page to the newest addons. Now, there is a link to sort by "recently added" near the top of the page, so visitors are one click away from seeing the most recent. Also, there is a sort by "recently updated" option. I remember people frequently updating and seeing their extensions remain in the "most recent" section. For finding similar sites, I personally use xmarks and similarsites.com. (Fo)xmarks obviously has a firefox extension. Similarsites.com has an extension with around a million downloads; don't know if the chicken came before the egg, though. You could bundle some functionality into your addon like quantcast/alexa/pagerank data push it as an SEO tool. An ironic usage of your website just occurred to me: 1. Use google to find a couple of marketing/seo blogs/websites. 2. Input these websites into moreofit.com to find more marketing/seo sites. 3. Email list of found sites about moreofit.com and how useful it is for marketers. Describe how you found them using moreofit.com.

photon_off 16y ago
Sending the link about to marketing/seo sites is a good idea. I suppose it would do them good to encourage people to see what their competition is up to; and even better that you can sort by popularity to give you some insight as to how your more-popular counterparts got where they are. As per the bookmarklet... that's coming shortly. My next project is going to blow up the bookmarklet space.