6 ms·

Ask HN: What did you create in 2011?

26 points by mumm 15y ago

What side projects, apps, hacks did you build in 2011?

pawn 15y ago
I created my first xbox 360 game, piniq. http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/piniq/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550a04 http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/piniq/66acd000-77f...
aespinoza 15y ago
I created a really cool Back-end-as-a-Service called iKnode. http://iknode.com http://iknode.com
sagacity 15y ago
Two that I like the most (although not exactly side projects): http://getlocalne.ws http://getlocalne.ws (Global News Aggregator) and http://www.RapiDefs.com http://www.RapiDefs.com (Web 2.0 English Dictionary)
- dholowiski 15y ago
  Wow, I live in a small town in Canada and it had a news feed. Nice. You might want to think about geolocating the user by IP address, and displaying their local news without having to select a city.
  - sagacity 15y ago
    Thanks. The home page already has IP to geolocation to suggest country/city, using a free open db (so the city-level accuracy is not very high).
- zeynalov 15y ago
  getlocalne.ws is a nice project. but it needs a facelift.
  - sagacity 15y ago
    Thanks. We're still hard at work stabilising/optimising the back-end to handle the constantly growing (organic) load/traffic efficiently. With almost 65 million headlines archived so far, and about 250k fresh ones getting added daily, all this continues to be a bit of a battle here. :) We've planned to work on polishing the front-end etc. once the back-end is sorted out satisfactorily.
gdhillon 15y ago
We created a context aware to-do/task list application. We make recommendations for each of user's tasks to help them get done quickly. Check us out at: http://diglig.com http://diglig.com
pkamb 15y ago
Got some apps into the Mac App Store. Such as... Reddit Notifier (for your OS X menubar): http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit-notifier/id468366517?mt=12 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit-notifier/id468366517?m...
jessepollak 15y ago
Built an app to help students at my college save money by finding a shared ride to the airport. http://5crideshare.com/ http://5crideshare.com/
polyfractal 15y ago
An email list! I interview startups which are hiring and email the interview to my list. Thinking about podcasting the interviews in the near future. http://startupfrontier.com http://startupfrontier.com Also a visualization of US Foreign Aid using D3: http://www.euphonious-intuition.com/USForeignAidVis/ http://www.euphonious-intuition.com/USForeignAidVis/
MattBearman 15y ago
I created BugMuncher - a feedback widget that allows users to create marked-up screenshots of website errors (like on Google +) - http://bugmuncher.com http://bugmuncher.com
- dholowiski 15y ago
  Looks great, I might actually use this today. Also, nice theme... i'm using the exact same one for one of my projects.
  - MattBearman 15y ago
    Thanks! Hope you like it, and please let me know if you have any suggestions as I'm putting a lot more time into it this year. You wouldn't believe how many sites I've seen using that theme, unfortunately it's arguably the best SaaS theme on themeforest, one of my goals this year is to get a new site deign.
jmslau 15y ago
Built a simple site to visually search Kijiji (in Canada) and Craigslist (US and Canada) to help my wife look for baby stuff. http://shopcaste.com http://shopcaste.com
dholowiski 15y ago
I created http://onepix.me http://onepix.me in about 3 months of 2011 I did the bulk of the coding on http://localbeer.me http://localbeer.me (find great beer, brewed locally) in 2011 I created http://imgonly.info http://imgonly.info - only the images from the Reddit home page in 2011 I also created several smaller failures, which were quite fun as well. My plan for 2012 is to create revenue from one, or all of the above sites.
pknerd 15y ago
I created Snapmarks- http://sm.sidlabs.com http://sm.sidlabs.com
- pknerd 15y ago
  Oh I created Am I Beautiful too. Another iphone app just to help those women/girls who think they are not good at all and perform bad in their lives just because they think no one love them. http://mib.sidlabs.com http://mib.sidlabs.com
MarkTraceur 15y ago
https://qrustom.com https://qrustom.com was a big project for me, https://gitorious.org/stattr https://gitorious.org/stattr was another, and http://test.mine.bz http://test.mine.bz was something I contributed to. I also did https://gitorious.org/mmake https://gitorious.org/mmake , though I don't feel like I really finished it. I also did a really stupid javascript library: https://gist.github.com/1138419 https://gist.github.com/1138419 Hopefully 2012 will be even better!
jonp 15y ago
I built http://www.birthdaysudoku.com http://www.birthdaysudoku.com - sudoku puzzles customised to include a date of birth.
davesmylie 15y ago
I created http://dudmail.com http://dudmail.com - a disposable email site that allows you to automatically forward emails, and permits attachments. It's not been as much of a success as I was hoping (currently 1200 registered users, with quite a large number more of unregistered users), but it was a project that I started and finished =)
- pestaa 15y ago
  For 1200 users, many entrepreneurs would cut out and sell their kidneys. Congratulations on shipping your project! I'd like to check it out, but seems down for the moment... EDIT: It's live actually. Looks like a problem on my end.
  - davesmylie 15y ago
    yeah, don't get me wrong - I'm (sorta) happy with that, but I don't think they're 1200 real users. You don't need to register to use 90% of the sites functionality, so most people probably never register. But it's free to register, so of those that do, probably only 10% come back and use the site regularly. Certainly it only seems to translate to about 100-200 uniques a day. I'm still getting about 2-10 registrations a day, so hopefully (given a long enough period of time) that number will go up. The big problem at the moment though is that I've submitted to all the app directories that I could find. This made a huge difference in google page rank for "disposable email" (made it up to page two at one point). Now though, with no new links I'm slowly sinking (now down to page four).
smoovej 15y ago
Created a fun book recommendation site for kids: http://bookoneer.com http://bookoneer.com
JangoSteve 15y ago
In addition to client work... * Created http://jspkg.com http://jspkg.com for hosting javascript packages. A sort of plugins.jquery alternative, except for all JS projects. This is still a very active work in progress that I've been working on for about 7 months now. * Created the jquery dynatable plugin as a semantic HTML5 replacement for jquery datatables (http://jspkg.com/packages/dynatable http://jspkg.com/packages/dynatable). * Rewrote basically the entirety of the rails/jquery-ujs adapter (kind of a creation, right?) that's now included in Rails (https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs and https://rubygems.org/gems/jquery-rails https://rubygems.org/gems/jquery-rails). * Rewrote the entire remotipart gem for ajax file uploads in rails (https://rubygems.org/gems/remotipart https://rubygems.org/gems/remotipart) (again, I'm assuming the rewrite counts, since it essentially became an entirely new project that happened to have the same goals as the original). I also contributed to a lot of other open-source projects like the ruby carrierwave gem, citizenry, ruby sunspot (solr gem), ruby-git gem, and some others. I consider these contributions to be pretty much on-par with things created, because whenever I want to create something, my first step is seeing if there may be some existing project that even comes close, to which I could contribute instead of starting something new for people to keep up with. So really the only difference between creating and contributing is whether or not I can find something of similar quality and purpose that already exists.
ecaroth 15y ago
Still a work in progress, and none outside of my fulltime job: FitBolt (fitbolt.com) - workday health & wellness platform. Gives you alerts/actions/notifications with posture corrections, exercises, stretching, health & nutrition tips. Currently have a web version, firefox & chrome plugin, and pokki (desktop) version
svmegatron 15y ago
A handful of weekend and side projects: * http://www.coachulous.com http://www.coachulous.com, a web app for triathlon coaches * http://loanarranger.heroku.com http://loanarranger.heroku.com, a visualization tool for mortgage/car/student loans * Aspect Ratio Converter (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aspect-ratio-converter/id477698489?mt=12 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aspect-ratio-converter/id4776...), a calculator for resizing images, embedded video, and flash objects without screwing up the aspect ratio * http://www.receiptparty.com http://www.receiptparty.com, a service that stores and organizes your digital receipts * http://realpersonreminders.com http://realpersonreminders.com, telephone reminders from a real person
deutronium 15y ago
I created http://www.adopt-a-cloud.com/ http://www.adopt-a-cloud.com/ based on a half bakery idea (http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Adoptacloud_2eorg http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Adoptacloud_2eorg) using the Play framework.
ohashi 15y ago
Created Gift Lizard (http://www.giftlizard.com http://www.giftlizard.com) a tag based gift search/discovery site.
sdotsen 15y ago
My first solo project is called iKeepm. It's a service that allows you to track your personal assets for insurance purposes. http://www.ikeepm.com http://www.ikeepm.com
brewin 15y ago
http://20suggestions.com http://20suggestions.com - Recommendations based on your tweets. I created it to learn Ruby, Sinatra, JQuery, and web development in general. It was a fun little project.
tg3 15y ago
I made http://www.newsfeedy.com http://www.newsfeedy.com to provide context for trending topics at a glance. Born of my desire to know what breaking news/trends were, while being too lazy to google the Twitter trending topics. Started writing (semi) regularly on my blog, http://tgriff3.tumblr.com http://tgriff3.tumblr.com - a big step after many stops and starts.
apsurd 15y ago
http://jekyllbootstrap.com http://jekyllbootstrap.com - The quickest and most hassle-free way to get your new Jekyll powered website up and running. 100% compatible with GitHub pages.
aymeric 15y ago
I created http://goalstribe.com http://goalstribe.com (democratizing group coaching) and UserLove http://userlove.net/products/5 http://userlove.net/products/5 (Get video testimonials from your users).
rykov 15y ago
http://www.gemfury.com http://www.gemfury.com for hosting private Ruby Gems. I wanted a unified way to deploy software for another project and decided to use gems. First built it for myself, then figured it would benefit others.
bodegajed 15y ago
I made http://tweetcaddy.com http://tweetcaddy.com a web-based tweet calendar scheduling software :)
damoncali 15y ago
Bison Ballistics: http://bisonballistics.com http://bisonballistics.com

26 points by mumm 15y ago

What side projects, apps, hacks did you build in 2011?

pawn 15y ago

I created my first xbox 360 game, piniq. http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/piniq/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550a04 http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/piniq/66acd000-77f...

aespinoza 15y ago

I created a really cool Back-end-as-a-Service called iKnode. http://iknode.com http://iknode.com

sagacity 15y ago

Two that I like the most (although not exactly side projects): http://getlocalne.ws http://getlocalne.ws (Global News Aggregator) and http://www.RapiDefs.com http://www.RapiDefs.com (Web 2.0 English Dictionary)

dholowiski 15y ago
Wow, I live in a small town in Canada and it had a news feed. Nice. You might want to think about geolocating the user by IP address, and displaying their local news without having to select a city.
- sagacity 15y ago
  Thanks. The home page already has IP to geolocation to suggest country/city, using a free open db (so the city-level accuracy is not very high).
zeynalov 15y ago
getlocalne.ws is a nice project. but it needs a facelift.
- sagacity 15y ago
  Thanks. We're still hard at work stabilising/optimising the back-end to handle the constantly growing (organic) load/traffic efficiently. With almost 65 million headlines archived so far, and about 250k fresh ones getting added daily, all this continues to be a bit of a battle here. :) We've planned to work on polishing the front-end etc. once the back-end is sorted out satisfactorily.

gdhillon 15y ago

We created a context aware to-do/task list application. We make recommendations for each of user's tasks to help them get done quickly. Check us out at: http://diglig.com http://diglig.com

pkamb 15y ago

Got some apps into the Mac App Store. Such as... Reddit Notifier (for your OS X menubar): http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit-notifier/id468366517?mt=12 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit-notifier/id468366517?m...

jessepollak 15y ago

Built an app to help students at my college save money by finding a shared ride to the airport. http://5crideshare.com/ http://5crideshare.com/

polyfractal 15y ago

An email list! I interview startups which are hiring and email the interview to my list. Thinking about podcasting the interviews in the near future. http://startupfrontier.com http://startupfrontier.com Also a visualization of US Foreign Aid using D3: http://www.euphonious-intuition.com/USForeignAidVis/ http://www.euphonious-intuition.com/USForeignAidVis/

MattBearman 15y ago

I created BugMuncher - a feedback widget that allows users to create marked-up screenshots of website errors (like on Google +) - http://bugmuncher.com http://bugmuncher.com

dholowiski 15y ago
Looks great, I might actually use this today. Also, nice theme... i'm using the exact same one for one of my projects.
- MattBearman 15y ago
  Thanks! Hope you like it, and please let me know if you have any suggestions as I'm putting a lot more time into it this year. You wouldn't believe how many sites I've seen using that theme, unfortunately it's arguably the best SaaS theme on themeforest, one of my goals this year is to get a new site deign.

jmslau 15y ago

Built a simple site to visually search Kijiji (in Canada) and Craigslist (US and Canada) to help my wife look for baby stuff. http://shopcaste.com http://shopcaste.com

dholowiski 15y ago

I created http://onepix.me http://onepix.me in about 3 months of 2011 I did the bulk of the coding on http://localbeer.me http://localbeer.me (find great beer, brewed locally) in 2011 I created http://imgonly.info http://imgonly.info - only the images from the Reddit home page in 2011 I also created several smaller failures, which were quite fun as well. My plan for 2012 is to create revenue from one, or all of the above sites.

pknerd 15y ago

I created Snapmarks- http://sm.sidlabs.com http://sm.sidlabs.com

pknerd 15y ago
Oh I created Am I Beautiful too. Another iphone app just to help those women/girls who think they are not good at all and perform bad in their lives just because they think no one love them. http://mib.sidlabs.com http://mib.sidlabs.com

MarkTraceur 15y ago

https://qrustom.com https://qrustom.com was a big project for me, https://gitorious.org/stattr https://gitorious.org/stattr was another, and http://test.mine.bz http://test.mine.bz was something I contributed to. I also did https://gitorious.org/mmake https://gitorious.org/mmake , though I don't feel like I really finished it. I also did a really stupid javascript library: https://gist.github.com/1138419 https://gist.github.com/1138419 Hopefully 2012 will be even better!

jonp 15y ago

I built http://www.birthdaysudoku.com http://www.birthdaysudoku.com - sudoku puzzles customised to include a date of birth.

davesmylie 15y ago

I created http://dudmail.com http://dudmail.com - a disposable email site that allows you to automatically forward emails, and permits attachments. It's not been as much of a success as I was hoping (currently 1200 registered users, with quite a large number more of unregistered users), but it was a project that I started and finished =)

pestaa 15y ago
For 1200 users, many entrepreneurs would cut out and sell their kidneys. Congratulations on shipping your project! I'd like to check it out, but seems down for the moment... EDIT: It's live actually. Looks like a problem on my end.
- davesmylie 15y ago
  yeah, don't get me wrong - I'm (sorta) happy with that, but I don't think they're 1200 real users. You don't need to register to use 90% of the sites functionality, so most people probably never register. But it's free to register, so of those that do, probably only 10% come back and use the site regularly. Certainly it only seems to translate to about 100-200 uniques a day. I'm still getting about 2-10 registrations a day, so hopefully (given a long enough period of time) that number will go up. The big problem at the moment though is that I've submitted to all the app directories that I could find. This made a huge difference in google page rank for "disposable email" (made it up to page two at one point). Now though, with no new links I'm slowly sinking (now down to page four).

smoovej 15y ago

Created a fun book recommendation site for kids: http://bookoneer.com http://bookoneer.com

JangoSteve 15y ago

In addition to client work... * Created http://jspkg.com http://jspkg.com for hosting javascript packages. A sort of plugins.jquery alternative, except for all JS projects. This is still a very active work in progress that I've been working on for about 7 months now. * Created the jquery dynatable plugin as a semantic HTML5 replacement for jquery datatables (http://jspkg.com/packages/dynatable http://jspkg.com/packages/dynatable). * Rewrote basically the entirety of the rails/jquery-ujs adapter (kind of a creation, right?) that's now included in Rails (https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs and https://rubygems.org/gems/jquery-rails https://rubygems.org/gems/jquery-rails). * Rewrote the entire remotipart gem for ajax file uploads in rails (https://rubygems.org/gems/remotipart https://rubygems.org/gems/remotipart) (again, I'm assuming the rewrite counts, since it essentially became an entirely new project that happened to have the same goals as the original). I also contributed to a lot of other open-source projects like the ruby carrierwave gem, citizenry, ruby sunspot (solr gem), ruby-git gem, and some others. I consider these contributions to be pretty much on-par with things created, because whenever I want to create something, my first step is seeing if there may be some existing project that even comes close, to which I could contribute instead of starting something new for people to keep up with. So really the only difference between creating and contributing is whether or not I can find something of similar quality and purpose that already exists.

ecaroth 15y ago

Still a work in progress, and none outside of my fulltime job: FitBolt (fitbolt.com) - workday health & wellness platform. Gives you alerts/actions/notifications with posture corrections, exercises, stretching, health & nutrition tips. Currently have a web version, firefox & chrome plugin, and pokki (desktop) version

svmegatron 15y ago

A handful of weekend and side projects: * http://www.coachulous.com http://www.coachulous.com, a web app for triathlon coaches * http://loanarranger.heroku.com http://loanarranger.heroku.com, a visualization tool for mortgage/car/student loans * Aspect Ratio Converter (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aspect-ratio-converter/id477698489?mt=12 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aspect-ratio-converter/id4776...), a calculator for resizing images, embedded video, and flash objects without screwing up the aspect ratio * http://www.receiptparty.com http://www.receiptparty.com, a service that stores and organizes your digital receipts * http://realpersonreminders.com http://realpersonreminders.com, telephone reminders from a real person

deutronium 15y ago

I created http://www.adopt-a-cloud.com/ http://www.adopt-a-cloud.com/ based on a half bakery idea (http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Adoptacloud_2eorg http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Adoptacloud_2eorg) using the Play framework.

ohashi 15y ago

Created Gift Lizard (http://www.giftlizard.com http://www.giftlizard.com) a tag based gift search/discovery site.

sdotsen 15y ago

My first solo project is called iKeepm. It's a service that allows you to track your personal assets for insurance purposes. http://www.ikeepm.com http://www.ikeepm.com

brewin 15y ago

http://20suggestions.com http://20suggestions.com - Recommendations based on your tweets. I created it to learn Ruby, Sinatra, JQuery, and web development in general. It was a fun little project.

tg3 15y ago

I made http://www.newsfeedy.com http://www.newsfeedy.com to provide context for trending topics at a glance. Born of my desire to know what breaking news/trends were, while being too lazy to google the Twitter trending topics. Started writing (semi) regularly on my blog, http://tgriff3.tumblr.com http://tgriff3.tumblr.com - a big step after many stops and starts.

apsurd 15y ago

http://jekyllbootstrap.com http://jekyllbootstrap.com - The quickest and most hassle-free way to get your new Jekyll powered website up and running. 100% compatible with GitHub pages.

aymeric 15y ago

I created http://goalstribe.com http://goalstribe.com (democratizing group coaching) and UserLove http://userlove.net/products/5 http://userlove.net/products/5 (Get video testimonials from your users).

rykov 15y ago

http://www.gemfury.com http://www.gemfury.com for hosting private Ruby Gems. I wanted a unified way to deploy software for another project and decided to use gems. First built it for myself, then figured it would benefit others.

bodegajed 15y ago

I made http://tweetcaddy.com http://tweetcaddy.com a web-based tweet calendar scheduling software :)

damoncali 15y ago

Bison Ballistics: http://bisonballistics.com http://bisonballistics.com