

Learning from my web app 23 visits at a time - juanre
http://juanreyero.com/article/technology/23visits.html

======
ars
Not sure if this is the right place to tell you this, but no one wants to buy
a pdf of a star chart. If I want a computer star chart I'll use a program to
generate one live. It might not be as pretty as yours, but it's interactive.

Now if you actually printed large (huge?) format posters of the star chart you
would have a market.

People would love to print a start chart as visible in a specific special
place and time. It would be a great gift for weddings, birthdays, graduation,
etc.

~~~
juanre
Thank you for the suggestion. I've thought about setting up an agreement with
a print shop, where I can send the PDF or PS to them and they do the printing
and sending. But before going that route I wanted to figure out if anybody
would want a personalized star chart to start with. Looks like I need to look
seriously into it.

~~~
narag
Check <http://blogalia.com/>

There are some professional astronomers blogging over there, doing
divulgation. They might be interested. At the very least, they will link the
site.

~~~
vrruiz
Thanks for the mention! (I'm the founder of Blogalia :)

IMHO, greaterskies.com is interesting as a project, but:

\- I don't think anyone will pay for simple visual star charts: there are free
sites, free desktop programs and free tablet/mobile apps out there.

\- If not for visual, but deep sky: there is 3Atlas from José R. Torres (9, 11
and 13 mag sky atlas): <http://www.uv.es/jrtorres/tools.html> Available for
free in PDF.

\- The marketing problem: find your tribe! There are some forums, like
cloudynights.com (or <http://www.asociacionhubble.org/portal/index.php/foro>
in Spanish), but this are mostly for dedicated observers.

My 2 cents.

------
bambax
Thanks for this article!

I had a comparable experience last week launching an online Markdown editor:

<http://akaya.me>

and nobody noticed, as I blogged about it here:

[http://blog.medusis.com/all-quiet-on-the-western-front-
silen...](http://blog.medusis.com/all-quiet-on-the-western-front-silence-its-
ha)

But I don't think you're right when you say " _it's possible that nobody wants
what greaterskies offers today. And most of the features that I've been adding
for the last week are probably irrelevant._ " Well, it's _possible_ , yes, but
you don't know that one way or the other.

Nothing happened because nobody saw your announcement (or mine); nobody saw it
because HN gets hit by a deluge of posts at any time of the day, and luck has
a big part in deciding which ones don't sink immediately. (Time of day
matters, but time of week matters also; I since noticed that slow days
(Sundays esp.) are better for the "Show HN" type of message.)

I think what we need are two things:

\- on the functional side, beta-testers that are dependable (as opposed to
casual); maybe that means they're paid, but maybe we can do with "honest
friends"

\- on the marketing side, a _story_ , of which your post is a start (I'm still
looking for mine).

Don't give up! and please keep us posted.

~~~
autoreverse
Thanks for building Akayame bambax. Pretty neat.

A few comments:

1) Please add one or more licenses so developers can include Akayame in their
projects with confidence. A couple of examples:

<http://jquery.org/license/>

<https://github.com/jquery/sizzle/blob/master/LICENSE>

2) The footer and menu are below the fold in my browsers in the Converter and
Editor views so I need to scroll to see the menu and "Yet Another Markdown
Editor" text.

3) The footer could do with improved styling : text overlaps the border,
bullets and links use default styles. Minor quibbles but improvements would
improve the professionalism of the site. Image here:

[http://autoreverse.s3.amazonaws.com/2011006_Akayame_footer.j...](http://autoreverse.s3.amazonaws.com/2011006_Akayame_footer.jpg)

4) Landing page does not convey to the visitors what the site is about
(and"Yet Another Markdown Editor" is below the fold).

5) Adding a page or two with keyword rich text explaining the project ("jQuery
powered online Markdown editor") and background ("inspired by other Showdown
online Markdown editor projects") could help with search engines listings.

6) Have you considered hosting the code on Github for increased exposure and
link juice?

~~~
bambax
Many thanks for your comments (we're pretty OT now and I'm sorry to piggyback
on greaterskies story).

I'm clearly design-challenged but I don't really know what to do about it
(except hiring someone who, unlike me, knows what they're doing; but I don't
have the cash). But I did test the footer in many browsers and am surprised to
see that it can fall below the fold; I guess I'll test again.

What do you mean by "developers can include Akayame in their projects": right
now it's just a webapp, the code isn't available and there's no API, so why
would you need a licence?

(The code would need some serious cleaning before being shown publicly; as for
an API I don't think it's applicable, although I'm working on a sister project
to transform HTML to clean HTML and/or Markdown, with a public API).

------
alex5092
I like the idea. I am trying to buy a chart for my wedding date in Pittsburgh,
but the download after preview fails to happen. I using Chrome on a Mac. Maybe
I am using it wrong. I don't know.

Anyway, here are my feature requests:

1) See what a chart looks like immediately. Can be pre-generated. (Someone
already said this in a previous comment)

2) Would like to annotate my chart with notes or custom title, subtitle, etc

3) Share chart on various social media sites as an interactive widget or
simply a photo. (Someone already said this in a previous comment)

4) Print to a T-shirt or mug on zazzle.com or other T-shirt site (you can
probably make money here as an affiliate).

5) This is a little crazy, but maybe overlay my wedding gift registry items on
top of the star chart so that people can buy our wedding registry items in a
cool and interactive way instead of navigating through multiple totally crappy
wedding registry sites. (again you can probably make money as an affiliate
here)... it's just an idea...

Good luck with the project!

~~~
juanre
Thanks for the ideas!

The problem with the preview request is that the server is struggling. Beefing
it up right now on AWS.

------
sushidev
Two suggestions:

1\. After filling in the info I started looking where to click next and was a
bit surprised that it is above to the left of the map, I think you have to
make the interface flow a bit more intuitive. 2\. It would be great to see the
image in small format before I pay.

~~~
juanre
Thank you very much for the feedback. Maybe I should put the next click to the
right? I'll certainly try it out. As for your second point, you should be able
to see the image in large format before paying: a link appears after you have
input the map data where you can ask for a preview, and a full-sized one will
be created for you.

------
bajsejohannes
Thanks. A little tip: Make the star chart in the blog link to
<http://greaterskies.com/> . I clicked it more than once before I realized I
had to find the link in the text.

~~~
juanre
Done. Thanks.

------
juanre
The traffic from HN has reduced my previous statistics to noise, so I've
thought I'd as well implement some of the feedback I've got, online now. Also,
the server is suffering and I cannot try to set load balancing because I need
to run to a meeting (why didn't I before?). So I've added feedback to let you
know at which steps the server is struggling, asking for some patience.

Thanks everybody!

------
hedgehog
Might be attractive for people celebrating anniversaries or having kids. Sort
of a cosmic snapshot of that particular time and place.

~~~
juanre
I like the cosmic snapshot approach, maybe with the rest of the cosmos left as
an exercise for the reader.

------
fleitz
Awesome job man!

Ease of use requests for the star chart page:

    
    
      1. GeoIP db to get current location
      2. Autofill location
      3. autofill date
      4. autofill local time
    

GEO IP: [http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/03/31/3-free-ways-to-
ge...](http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/03/31/3-free-ways-to-geolocate-by-
ip/)

Viral ideas:

    
    
      1. Allow creation of star charts from FB data (eg. City / DOB)
      2. Add FB share link.
      3. People buy star charts for friends
    

It pains me that people believe in this psuedo-science, but will make you
money ideas:

    
    
      1. Allow some kind of astrological star chart that is 
         tangentially related to their astrological sign.
      2. Pair with FB (eg. Fred's Libra Starchart)
    
    
    
    

Btw, yesterday was my birthday and if I could have posted this on my wall it
would have been awesome. (Not the astrology part)

~~~
juanre
Thanks! And thank you for the pointer to the geoip options. I know I should
look into astrology, but it kind of pains me. And I'll check out FB pairing as
well.

~~~
fleitz
Yeah, I'd put the astrology one up on a separate domain.

For the astrology thing you may want to see if you can join some kind of
affiliate program and put a link in the PDF might pay more in aggregate giving
them away for free.

------
mmavnn
Awesome project! I do have one feature request (preferably before my wife's
birthday...), which is the ability to add custom text as a heading of some
kind.

For example, I would be ordering a picture of the night sky over Rome on a
particular night, and it would be nice if the poster said so - not everyone
knows Rome's lat./long. off by heart.

~~~
juanre
Sure, I'll add it. Should it appear at the top, encircling the map, or at the
bottom?

Thanks for the feedback!

------
pragmatic
A star chart of the Star Wars "Universe" would be the best thing ever. (and I
know there would be licensing issues)

Also, what about EVE Online players, would it be cool to offer them some kind
of print out?

(Think of any other persistent games, or imaginary universes).

Think of things people are passionate about.

------
jarsj
I think this is great, but I ain't paying for anything I can't see. The flow
should be Enter Location -> Image Preview -> Share-on-FB or Pay-to-Print.
That's your MVP. Hard-Code it for a few locations or show some random image
previews.

~~~
jarsj
My bad. Your product does everything, but in a totally non-obvious way. Please
do yourself a favour and read the book "Don't make me think"

~~~
juanre
Yep, I kind of know I am obvious-challenged. Thanks for the suggestion.

------
doctororange
Great site, but I found the interface very confusing. It took me ages to
figure out what to do next at every step. The resizing text is an ok idea, but
currently it's more distracting than guiding. Hope that's helpful. :)

~~~
juanre
Thanks. Maybe I could make arrows appear, or something. Need to try it out.

------
optimus
How is the chart supposed to be interpreted? Is it me looking up at the sky on
a particular night seeing a a 360-degree view of the stars?

Also, how are future positions determined?

------
pmorovic
great article - impressive what you've done there (connecting all the
different pieces, including Common Lisp and AWS!!). love the charts too!

------
fduran
thanks for sharing Juan. I think HN managed to bring
<http://greaterskies.com/> down.

~~~
juanre
Indeed. And I cannot figure out how to scale it up without changing the DNS to
point to a load balancer. Oh well.

