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10k Bootstrap Challenge: Launch of hnalerts.com
- robfitz 14y agoAnd guess how I found out this had been posted here? ;) Thanks!
- TamDenholm 14y agoI figured you'd notice that, been following your blog since i saw you started, figured you'd be happy to see a text altering you that it was submitted. :) Carry on, you're doing awesome.
- mikkel 14y agoThis is a really cool concept - all the social monitoring tools I've seen focus on social networks (fb, twitter, that sort of stuff), which is great for some companies with an existing fanbase - not so much for startups. I've signed up :)
- yashchandra 14y agoI checked it out. If you input is not good (for example, I entered letters in the phone number field), it breaks the app and exposes the entire Django stacktrace since it seems ilke DEBUG is set to True. I guess this is a small side project of course but thought to point it out.
- robfitz 14y agoRight you are. Glad I had the thing hooked up to notify me about this potential trainwreck! Big thanks for the heads up. It's fixed & off debug mode now. It will fail silently, which still isn't exactly ideal, but at least it doesn't reveal its innards any more. Thanks again.
- yashchandra 14y agono problem. Are you using Django form validation ? It should take care of this then.
- sparknlaunch 14y agoLooks good. How does it work? What tool is being used to send the text message? And why text message over email or other online notification?
- robfitz 14y agoIt's just twilio for texts plus django and a cronjob. Text messages are the use case I wanted most for myself, so I just did that first. I'll add email/twitter/etc if the simple version gets a good enough response to warrant it
- hiddenfeatures 14y agoYeah, email would be cool for a lot of international "customers" as text messaging doesn't work in a bunch of European countries with twilio.
- blantonl 14y agoGreat idea. Now, how do I unsubscribe or disable alerts in the future?
- robfitz 14y agoIf you reply to the text message, it will cancel all alerts going to that number. So if you are signed up to get alerts on 3 domains and only want to cancel one, you'll have to send one unsubscribe (which will cancel all 3) and then re-add the ones you still want to be active. Not ideal in that edge case, I know, but I wanted to make sure unsubscribing was easy in case someone got cheeky and starting signing other people up.
- duck 14y agoIt is nice to know when your site hits HN, but for me http://ifttt.com/ http://ifttt.com/ works fine in addition to doing a lot more.
- robfitz 14y agoifttt is pretty much my favourite service at the moment. It saves me hours a day and everyone should use it! edit: Well, let's say it saves me hour per day. Hours plural is probably stretching it
- lem72 14y agoCan I ask how it is saving you hours per day... I like the idea, I just can't think of cool ways to use it.
- robfitz 14y agoFor example, I do a little video blog where I film a 1 minute video about my startup progress most days[1] I make the video on socialcam, which sends it to youtube. ifttt then picks up the youtube video once it's uploaded and turns it into a wordpress post, then picks up the wordpress post and tweets about it. It turns a 5-step process (full of annoying upload delays) into a 1-step process with no delays. I haven't found any consumption use cases for it, but I love it for tying together all the places I create stuff at. [1] http://bootstrapchallenge.com http://bootstrapchallenge.com
- lem72 14y agoWow very cool - I had no idea. Thanks for the reply :)
- prezjordan 14y agoWow, thanks for showing me this. This is a beautiful product.
- modarts 14y agoThis is one of the coolest services i've seen on this site in quite some time. Thanks for sharing!
- dovyski 14y agoThat's really cool! I've signed up and will hopefully wait for the sms message :D
- robfitz 14y agoIt's super fun when they arrive unexpectedly. Here's to hoping you don't have long to wait! ;)
- lem72 14y agoCan you use an email address instead of a phone number? I don't use a cell anymore.
- robfitz 14y agoEnough people have asked about it that I'll add it asap -- I only check my email about once a day so it didn't even occur to me as a relevant use case!
- yashchandra 14y agoalso FYI. Most people in the US do not have free SMS/text messaging plans like other countries. Text messaging is unfortunately expensive here. That is another reason to add email which is readily available these days with smartphones. I know it is weird but most carriers in US charge you extra on top of minutes and data plan.
- FixThisPOS 14y agoWhat is "10k" about it? 10,000 what?
- phenom 14y agoPainting is called Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire, by the way [0]... Original reply was: Thou art a turkish imp, the damned devil's brother and friend, and a secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight art thou that cannot slay a hedgehog with your naked ass? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou son of a bitch wilt not ever make subjects of Christian sons; we have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck thy mother. ))) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossac...
- Alan01252 14y agoHow much is just hosting this service costing you? I can't see any method of payment, do you have plans to monetize it? Great MVP by the way.
- MiguelHudnandez 14y agoShould "monopolise" be "monetize?" :) I suppose we should all dream big, though...
- Alan01252 14y agoYes, yes it should. ;) thanks!
- pumblechook 14y agoJust wanted to say that this is a terrific project (and experiment). Inspirational for those of us who need a kick in the ass to shut up and get to work on that MVP. Maybe the next product is a $10k bootstrap challenge everyone can take? :)
- GDH 14y agoAm I the only one who sees this as something far too easily abused? I just signed up my brother (HNer/ programmer) for text alerts for imgur.com which is posted to reddit every minute.
- Killswitch 14y agoNice work, I had this idea a while ago and actually owned (not sure if expired right now or still in my posession) hnalerts.com to do the same thing.