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I've been working on this on weekends for a while now; it's now stable enough for some early adopting... Please report any bugs and feel free to ask questions.

I've been working on this on weekends for a while now; it's now stable enough for some early adopting... Please report any bugs and feel free to ask questions. You can also contact me at andrew@parti.cl. Thanks.

arkitaip 15y ago
How will the new GAE pricing affect you? So far we've been hearing some pretty disheartening stories.
- andrewcooke 15y ago
  Good question :o( When it was first announced it seemed terrible - the estimate for even the unused development site was significant. But then I tracked that down to some dumb coding of my own (a much-too-frequent cron-job). With that fixed, the site is pretty efficient (which is by design - it's supposed to scale well, after all). So I'm hoping it will work out OK. This is very much (I think) the kind of site that should work well on GAE - there's a lot of scope for caching. And this is one motivation for posting here - I want to see how well it handles higher traffic. Hopefully from that I can work out what a decent amount to charge would be (originally I was hoping for as low as a dollar a month a feed, but the changes may push that higher - perhaps significantly so).
jamesgeck0 15y ago
Aren't you competing with Gravatar, which is free and fairly popular?
- andrewcooke 15y ago
  yes. but i'm only planning to charge what is needed to cover the costs. if those are reasonable then i think some people would be willing to pay for something a bit more attractive. if not, well, at least i tried. (i'm not adverse to making money from this, if it becomes wildly popular, but it's not my main motivation. i did the ground work years ago and then posted a link to my notes in the thread on the robots approach here. someone contacted me about that, asking if i they could use it. i suggested a service, since i wanted to learn gae, and they thought that was a good idea...)
  - BobPalmer 15y ago
    The rub is that you already have Gravatar, which is 100% free, offers several options, and is easy as cake to implement... What compelling reason would someone have to use this service (and pay for it) that they cannot already get at Gravatar? i.e. what problem are you solving, or what underserved niche of Gravatar's customer base are you targeting, and how are they better served?

arkitaip 15y ago

How will the new GAE pricing affect you? So far we've been hearing some pretty disheartening stories.

andrewcooke 15y ago
Good question :o( When it was first announced it seemed terrible - the estimate for even the unused development site was significant. But then I tracked that down to some dumb coding of my own (a much-too-frequent cron-job). With that fixed, the site is pretty efficient (which is by design - it's supposed to scale well, after all). So I'm hoping it will work out OK. This is very much (I think) the kind of site that should work well on GAE - there's a lot of scope for caching. And this is one motivation for posting here - I want to see how well it handles higher traffic. Hopefully from that I can work out what a decent amount to charge would be (originally I was hoping for as low as a dollar a month a feed, but the changes may push that higher - perhaps significantly so).

jamesgeck0 15y ago

Aren't you competing with Gravatar, which is free and fairly popular?

andrewcooke 15y ago
yes. but i'm only planning to charge what is needed to cover the costs. if those are reasonable then i think some people would be willing to pay for something a bit more attractive. if not, well, at least i tried. (i'm not adverse to making money from this, if it becomes wildly popular, but it's not my main motivation. i did the ground work years ago and then posted a link to my notes in the thread on the robots approach here. someone contacted me about that, asking if i they could use it. i suggested a service, since i wanted to learn gae, and they thought that was a good idea...)
- BobPalmer 15y ago
  The rub is that you already have Gravatar, which is 100% free, offers several options, and is easy as cake to implement... What compelling reason would someone have to use this service (and pay for it) that they cannot already get at Gravatar? i.e. what problem are you solving, or what underserved niche of Gravatar's customer base are you targeting, and how are they better served?