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Show HN: Peerdiem — Discover and discuss one painting a day (peerdiem.com)

71 points by afkqs ↗ HN
Hi everyone, I made Peerdiem (a portmanteau word between Peer and Per Diem, which means Per Day in latin). The idea is very simple, a new painting or artwork to discover and discuss with your peers every day.

Content is currently only fetched from Chicago Art Institute Free API [1] but I'm planning to add more sources in the short future.

It was built with a couple of technologies I wanted to try for some time. Frontend is made with Preact and styled with Tailwindcss. Backend consists of an FastAPI app deployed in a Docker container.

[1] https://www.artic.edu/open-access/public-api

30 comments

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Cxckers
"No painting found for today"
afkqs
Shoot. I tested it on Firefox, Chrome and Safari without any issue. I will check the logs
itintheory
I'm not sure it's a browser issue, maybe a load issue? Could there be throttling on the backend API you're using to fetch the artwork?
afkqs
Do you get the same "No painting found for today" error as well? I'm fetching the artwork + metadata myself in advance to avoid any throttling on the API. I don't see any error on that endpoint in my logs, this is strange. I will investigate it further.
Hogarth01
It originally didn't load for me on Firefox. I turned my ad blocker off though and it loaded.
Cxckers
Yep, Firefox with ad blocker here too. That seems to be the issue
afkqs
Thanks for catching that! I couldn't find anything from my logs, that was frustrating. The frontend of Peerdiem is served from www.peerdiem.com while the backend uses www.api.peerdiem.com. It seems that a strict tuning of the AdBlocker might prevent requests to a subdomains. I will put up an explanatory text on the homepage for those encountering the same issue. Thanks again!
pacmanche
Love the idea
afkqs
Thanks! If you have any suggestions on improvements, I'm all ears. I hope to discuss some paintings with you there.
EZ-Cheeze
SOCIAL IT

Let users rate how much they like each painting, then show them which other users highly agree with them and which ones highly disagree

GameOfFrowns
Great idea, I just made this my browser startpage.

What happens to the discussion from the day before? How do you plan to solve comment spam?

afkqs
Thank you for making it your browser startpage, that's flattering!

Regarding the previous discussions, for now I'd like to try having only the artwork and the discussion for the current day. It goes against what most content platforms are proposing today with all the unlimited feeds everywhere but I feel it's a good way for people to take the time to reflect on the artwork and get deeper conversations.

All the previous comments are stored in a db at the moment so if the community grows and would like to access the previous discussions, that's feasible.

Regarding the spam issue, posting a comment currently requires creating an account (although without any email verification afterwards at the moment for the HN launch as I know many people here can be held back from trying out when the signup process is too intrusive).

There's also a minimum word limit for the comments to encourage constructive discussions and not just comments of the type - "Nice colours", "Love it", "That's not art".

Finally, I hope that being quite niche to art lovers, that might prevent too many spammy comments. We'll see!

naeemnur
You should have an archives page where we can see earlier paintings with closed comments.
levitate
Completely disagree. I love the contrast of this platform vs other social medias. The focus is on the moment, the current discussion. There is no infinite scrolling and timesuck. Also, not recording historical comments makes contributions more authentic. Nobody's trying to get a comment that will go down in platform history. It's like a real conversation. It exists in your memory. I think this minimalism and focus the main reason I really like this site.
Fang_
I appreciate the "just the current day" angle, but would gently remind about timezones. A 24-hour rotation isn't super friendly towards people who are online at the edges of that window. You might consider keeping a viewable archive of yesterday, just so one always has time to go back and see comments/replies.
afkqs
Thanks for your feedback, I just thought about the timezones last night. I will pass the client's date while fetching the artwork of the day so that everyone get the full 24h lapse.

For the read only archives, I can see from the comments on HN that it has been requested a couple of times but some people also seem to enjoy the "just the current day" angle as well so I'll have to decide on that.

maximedupre
That's an interesting app :) What motivated you to build peerdiem?
afkqs
Thanks Maxime! I was looking for a new way to discuss art. There are a couple of nice subreddits to discover new art but I found the discussions that went with them a bit disappointing. So with Peerdiem, I'd like people to take their time (a day) to observe, reflect and share their thoughts about the artwork. Congrats with the Birdy.so launch! Hopefully the free trials convert in a week :)
itintheory
I think this could be a fun and not so intimidating way to start to get more intentional in art appreciation. A couple minutes a day is a low enough investment that it would be easy to add to any schedule. I look forward to trying this when it's working.
afkqs
That would be a big win for me if people feel this way. I'm delighted with the comments the artwork is getting so far, great insights from everyone! I will check the logs in the morning (UTC timezone here) and will get to the bottom of this.
samizdis
Such a serene idea; no "like" button, no "see more works like this one" ... not even an option to buy the image on a T-shirt :-)

Really refreshing, and I look forward to my daily fix. Thanks.

afkqs
Glad you enjoyed it! I really wanted a minimalist interface so that the artwork is the real focal point. I'm looking forward to chatting with you on the platform!
pedrodelfino
Pretty cool! I would like to (i) receive an email about the discussion of the day (or RSS?) and (ii) it would be cool to search previous discussions. Maybe add some tags? Like #classic, #modern, #picasso, and so on.
afkqs
Thanks for your feedback Pedro!

> receive an email about the discussion of the day (or RSS?) Noted! I'll look into implementing something like that in the short future. That will be an opted-out feature by default so feel free to follow the platform updates on twitter ( @aco_le )

> it would be cool to search previous discussions. Maybe add some tags? Like #classic, #modern, #picasso, and so on. The possibility to see previous discussions have been requested a couple of times in the comments here on HN so I'll have to decide on that as well. Some people enjoy the "just for the day" angle of the website.

wsinks
Interesting idea! I lol'd at the name... Peerdiem sounds like crowdsourcing sharing company 'per diem' expenses... which I just don't see working.

This is more like "Artdiem".

But that's just my gut, I'd get used to it if I used it once per diem.

afkqs
I was not aware of the term used in that context. I just recently heard it in an episode of The Office when they fly to Winnipeg and it caught my ear. I might move the platform to a subdomain like art.peerdiem.com at some stages. Thanks for you feedback, and let me know if you have any other suggestions about the website. I hope to see there!
neonnoodle
Thank you for this. There’s a certain meditative quality to the site that I hardly ever see. It makes me think about Sister Wendy. :-)
senectus1
this is cool. might keep an eye on it.