

HNWatcher: track keywords and follow users on Hacker News - julien421
https://www.hnwatcher.com/

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hkmurakami
I've been using this to follow some users whose comments I respect, and it's
been a great improvement from loading the hn user comments page all the time.
I imagine this is more valuable for startups and marketing managers, but it's
been useful me the average hn addict as well :)

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Sujan
Feedback:

\- Autofocus on input field in modal windows after clicking "Follow a new
HackerNews user".

\- Remember my checkbox selection in the same modal window

\- Favicon!

\- Autofollowing e.g. "pg" could improve onboarding

\- Design is not very content focused right now, I would probably switch the
middle and right column

\- Highlight found keywords in comment text

\- Notify/show me if someone replied to one of my comments

\- Modify title depending on what is shown (Right now following.php always
shows "HackerNews users I follow" even when I have selected a specific one)

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julien421
Thank you for the feedback Sujan! Be sure we will work on this this week-end
:)

PS: we highlight the keywords only when you click on the specific keyword for
now.But not on the "All" sub-tab.

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Sujan
Ah I see. Why not? It would be especially useful there.

And I just noticed you remove all linebreaks in the output of comments right
now. Intentional or bug? Makes for some quite unstructured reads with e.g.
patio11's texts.

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sylvainkalache
@Sujan done! =)

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Sujan
Perfect, much better. The keywords.php is now actually useful.

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mickeyben
I've been using it for the past week and it's great.

If you wish to get alerts for your brand and receive the HN link while it's
hot it's the perfect tool.

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Fuzzwah
"Like any service, we will eventually charge our users."

I use plenty of services which don't charge me......

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julien421
Hey Fuzzwash,

You are right but unfortunatly, hosting + emails ( via mailgun ) are not free,
so at one point we will probably have to charge for the service if we have
lots of users. We are not a company and we are not funded, this is a week-
end(s) side-project :)

~~~
fecak
You've created an interesting product, but you may want to give more thought
to a monetization strategy. I don't see many paying to use something like
this, but it could get some users.

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Sujan
What are you using as the backend/API?

~~~
julien421
It is partially based on HN Search API [1] and partially based on homemade
Ruby scripts.

[1] HNSearch: [https://www.hnsearch.com/api](https://www.hnsearch.com/api)

~~~
Sujan
Nice, I'm asking because there was a similar service [1] that stopped working
without explanation before and that kinda sucked after getting used to it.

[1] [http://hackerfollow.com/](http://hackerfollow.com/)

~~~
julien421
Never heard of it. I will try to get in touch with them to see what happenned.

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rogaha
Very cool stuff! I was waiting for something like that! :)

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scanaki
Quiet nice!

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cedricgeffroy
Nice tool ! Luv it !

