HN Explorer

Tell HN: Something I made to see where something was posted first.

11 points by jacktasia ↗ HN
I've heard that it's pointless and the name is horrible. Although I don't want to give up quite yet. Ideas for a better name / to make it more worthwhile would be great. Thanks.

http://dexjra.com/where_first

11 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 35.2 ms ] thread
shaddi
Clickable: http://dexjra.com/where_first

Honestly, I'm not sure what the point is either, but it sure is interesting. Definitely something that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

pg
How about upstreamist?
jacktasia
Sounds good. I bought the domain. You made my day.
bseo
When I read the title I thought you made something that found the original source of a syndicated/re-posted article.

Anyway, since you have a database of submissions to HN, Reddit and Digg, there's alot of interesting things to do.

Off the top of my head, how about a side-by-side view of parallel discussions?

EDIT, some more suggestions:

Make a downloadable dump of your data at the end of each day. Would be useful for all the people scraping HN for their own purposes/websites.

Twitter would be more useful than Digg, although all the short-urls do pose a problem.

Your top15 page (http://dexjra.com/row_view) is strange. Why isn't HN there except the "First at Hacker News view" part?

jacktasia
I used to have all three sources in the top15 and then some non-programmers said I should remove it...it would be trivial to add that back in. It's really about who I am trying to reach. Ideally I would have different types/sections for mainstream (reddit.com front page, digg.com,etc) and then computer people (proggit, HN, etc). I just wasn't sure which direction to take it. Thanks for your feedback.

I'll make a dump of the data...what format do you think would be best?

Thanks for your feedback.

bseo
I'd rather have tracking deeper than the first page of each site, than themed sections, not that it's a bad idea.

I wouldn't mind CSV or JSON data and I'm sure some people would prefer XML. Should be trivial to make dumps in each of those formats.

hga
A bit strange but promising.

What can I say about a site where every couple of minutes spent on it I find something very interesting? Granted, some of those were tests of stuff I knew should be in the database, but it's still quite encouraging and the serendipitous discoveries were great.

Don't give it up yet unless you have to!

_delirium
If you have any data, I'd be curious how Slashdot fits in. Anecdotally, I notice a lot of borrowing in both directions between HN and Slashdot.
jacktasia
I don't have the Slashdot data...but it's certainly a good idea. Not sure how I didn't take to get data from them too. Thanks.
staunch
Just some domain ideas: firstp0st.com, subunderground.com, subspring.com.