

Show HN: My 10 minute non-project: Get a weekly digest of emails from any source - dools
http://weeklydigest.me/

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tomx
Can you provide a breakdown of the 10 minutes, saying what you were doing for
each of the 10 minutes?

~~~
dools
Minute 1: running a few whois queries, found weeklydigest.me

Minute 2: opened tabs in my browser with cheap-domainregistration.com,
wufoo.com, addthis.com, uservoice.com, google analytics (I already had those
last two open actually)

Minute 3: while waiting for them to finish loading (my internet is down so I'm
using my phone at the moment) I copied the template and virtual host config on
my server for pimpmysalary.com and tested it on
weeklydigest.mockups.decalcms.com

Minutes 4 - 9: added a domain to my DTC config, pasted in the GA, Uservoice
and AddThis code, made the Wufoo form and plugged it into my email backend at
flymessage.com, and pasted the code in, then updated the text on the page

Minute 10: went through the domain registration process using my saved credit
card (okay this may have taken more than a minute).

Were you the guy that wrote that article the other day after I posted "my 15
minute project" doubting the authenticity? These things are just pages copying
something I've done before with a Wufoo form. There's nothing there, it's just
an idea.

I didn't even have the idea, I got it from this Tweet from Mo Koyfman:

<http://twitter.com/#!/mokoyfman/status/96189723537715200>

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icebraining
Interesting. I'm not sure I'd give out my email address to do something that
could be accomplished more or less similarly by having a filter to
automatically label & archive the messages (and then look at that label
weekly), though.

Two feedbacks which aren't exactly an "idea": * The email address font is too
big, so I can't see the whole address at once. This has been shown to greatly
reduce errors * When I clicked on Feedback and then closed the popup, it
loaded the parent page in the popup. Screenshot:
<http://i.imgur.com/6JxxP.png>

~~~
dools
Yeah I noticed that! must be something dodgy with the UserVoice code, I might
open a ticket.

Thanks for the feedback on the email address! That's a good UX snippet I'd not
heard before.

~~~
icebraining
I heard that UX tip in some podcast with Luke Wroblewski, a web forms expert.

~~~
dools
Cool, I'll check him out, thanks

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apgwoz
This is a really great idea, but I find that I quite often just skip over
automated email, which is why it probably won't be useful to me.

This has me thinking, though, how can I trick myself into opening up a (known)
weekly digest email? Might work if it didn't come at the same time always
(like, every 4, 5 or 6 days randomly), and the From header was from a person.
But, I'm not sure on that.

~~~
dools
One of the ideas that someone sent through in the form which I think is great
is doing it by number of messages, rather than regular times.

I got about 30 people sign up and it'll only take me 6 hours or so to do a
basic version of this so I think I'm gonna go for it later in the week (maybe
Sunday night whilst watching movies :)

The ideas I've had emailed so far are:

1) arbitrary grouping (ie. aggregate multiple source emails into 1 group - so
you could have your weekly newsletter digest)

2) choose your interval

3) choose to have it recur based on number of messages

to this end I've just registered emaildigest.me instead of weeklydigest.me and
I'm going to do it like this:

groupname+interval+number@emaildigest.me

where interval is hourly,daily,weekly or monthly, groupname is just your own
grouping for this (single word tag only) and optionally you can include a
number argument which will "purge" the digest.

For example, you could forward all your twitter notifications to:

twitter+daily+40@emaildigest.me

and you'll receive a daily digest of your twitter emails - but if you get 40
in a day you'll receive 2 digests.

I'll also allow you to set your timezone and time of day to receive digests.

What do you reckon?

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prabodh
I would like to see what a sample digest looks like before giving out my email

~~~
dools
Cool idea, I'll mockup one up and add a link to it on the page, thanks!

------
dools
Hi, thanks everyone for commenting, sorry for the delayed responses - I'm
GMT+10 so I put this up before bed :)

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timmorgan
What's a "non-project"?

~~~
_grrr
and beyond proposing an idea, and collecting emails, what does this submission
contribute?

~~~
jmilloy
Why, it perpetuates the "My <pretend dev-time^> project" type submissions that
I seem to be in extreme minority in hating, while adding just enough of a
twist to seem forward thinking.

^I still don't understand why anyone cares how much typing time went into a
project - large small cool slick boring complete incomplete pretentious humble
whatever - and much less do I understand why that information belongs in the
title.

~~~
dools
Yeah, I really hate them too. That's why one of the first blog posts I wrote
about Decal was entitled "How we built a web application and didn't launch it
in 482 days".

I've made a submission each week over the past three weeks, each with
decreasing dev times because, hell, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!

The first was <http://cueyoutube.com/> "My Sunday Night Project", then last
week was "My 15 minute project: PimpMySalary.com" and now this one isn't even
a project, it's just a 10 minute idea.

Whilst my link bait titles are a bit tongue in cheek, there is a real reason
I'm doing this: it's therapeutic! I've found that just releasing software
serves several useful purposes:

1) It's a fun escape from the "real task" which is building decalcms.com which
is a very hard, complex task that's taking a really long time and which I'm
worried about monetising (and represents a huge investment of time and money)

2) It's a way of engaging with people and building an audience. Every time I
do something like this, I pick up a couple of Twitter followers, or I get to
engage with the people that sign up to discuss the product and of course I get
the name Working Software in front of a bunch of people

3) It gives some little ideas validation (or not) so that when I feel like a
little escape I have something that I can work on and know that there are at
least a few people that will care. I'm also building an ORM for SQL lovers at
<https://github.com/iaindooley/PluSQL/> \- I just find that if I don't do
something with tangible (or "releasable") results every week then I get very
bogged down in the marketing, monetisation and completion of Decal - this
helps me regain perspective on life.

4) It's conceivable that if I just so happen to execute one of these right,
it'll turn into a real product, who knows.

5) It's good practice for releasing. Putting something out in public is really
nerve wracking and I'm not that used to it (same with sending bulk emails).
Doing this over and over again desensitises me to it in a way that's kind of
quirky and fun, and not offensive (hopefully) to the people involved.

But I'll cool it on the "my 45 second glint in the milkman's eye" titles ;)
I've had my fun.

~~~
jmilloy
I love seeing your (and others') submissions! I've had a cueyoutube-like site
in the back of my mind for a few months and a) it's cool/now maybe there's no
need to do it and b) it just goes to show that your right: doing small
projects and releasing them can be hard and i should make an effort like you
have!

The amount of time usually just doesn't factor into whether the project is
worth anything or not. Did you spend 2 minutes on it when you should have
spent 20? Or did you spend a weekend when you could have spent a lunch break?
Did you think about your project while driving to work every morning for a
week and then type it out 10 minutes, or did you truly spend 10 minutes from
conception to publishing?

~~~
dools
Hey, thanks :) note that cueyoutube is just a static file - there's no
backend. There are also feature requests at cueyoutube.uservoice.com - if you
want to take part then I'd be happy to share the credit with you on the site!

Edit: also yeah I get what you're saying re: the time in the post titles. I
was really just poking fun at the whole thing. I'm still going to release
things but I'm just going to stop with my ridiculous titles.

