

[startup critique] Randomicity - Random sites from across the web - nostrademons
http://randomicity.diffle.com/

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nostrademons
This is a little side-project that I've been working on for about a week, in
between my main startup & taxes & moping around from being rejected by YC. It
crawls the web for sites (only frontpages, not the full text like Google), and
then displays a random selection of 20 on each refresh. The problem I'm trying
to solve is that I'll likely need a new idea for my startup, yet there's a
whole World Wide Web out there and I've never explored 99.9999% of it. Most
social news sites try very hard to give you sites you'll like, but I don't
want sites that I like; I want sites I've never heard of.

I initially had the idea for this about a year ago, but dismissed it as
"Something so simple couldn't possibly be useful." But recently, I got to
thinking about Paul Buchheit's blog posts on humility, and Linus Torvald's
advice on starting from a trivial problem and expanding it, and Evan Williams'
success stories with Blogger and Twitter. Maybe humility isn't just
acknowledging that the big idea you've pinned your hopes on may fail; maybe it
also involves acknowledging that all the little ideas that you've dismissed as
being incredibly stupid might also succeed. So here's my incredibly stupid
little idea. If it fails, I only invested 3-4 coding days in it, and it'd be
worth it just for the Django and BeautifulSoup practice.

Unlike past side projects, I _will_ be maintaining and updating this, as long
as it remains fun (i.e. as long as there're cool hacks that'd make it
noticeably more useful). I don't have any grand plan for it; my development
process is basically "Look at feedback e-mails, implement those, look at the
site, add any features that I think would be useful." If you've got ideas,
submit it through the feedback form (which I want to replace at some point;
I'm using James Bennett's django-contact-form plugin, and it's a bit
heavyweight for this purpose) or post here.

