Warning, a lot of what is posted in this article may seem 100% obvious to you. So, this morning I posted to Hacker News, Dzone, and Programmable Web about my latest creation, Choip.Me. I also did this on the same day that SXSW was going on. Primarily, this was an experiment. I wanted to see what would happen if I posted about a project I had but a moderate amount of effort into. Really Choip.me is an idea I had while working on another project. I was talking to someone on Twitter, getting some advice, and noticed it took me several tweets to say one thing, several times. I didn’t put a lot of planning into it, and it basically baked itself as I wrote the python and javascript. However, I am working on a project I hope that can one day be my own startup. So Choip.Me was an experiment in one idea I had for how to launch it. I’m still not sold on it not being the way to go, but this is enough to make me pause and consider it. That method is, just launch it. Like Choip.Me I am considering not going through the process of finding investors and such to do a launch. I think I can self fund it, especially if it starts out slow like Choip.Me. So, what have I learned?

If I want feedback, ask for it.

Easily most of the traffic today came from Hacker News. Actually, I don’t think I got any from Dzone and I’m not even sure if Programmable Web has posted it yet. This was my first submission to Hacker News, and I was a bit tentative. I posted it as Show HN:… if I wanted feedback I should has done Ask HN and specifically asked for feedback. If you want something, ask for it.

Keep it small at first, just because you can make that really cool feature doesn’t mean you should.

I made a great Twitter search engine, basically by re-purposing the interface used for selecting tweets when creating a Choip. However, as you’ll see in the next item, it’s questionable whether or not that just makes the site confusing or not.

The landing page of the site should be immediately usable.

Right now http://www.choip.me/ is a page that tells you all about Choip.Me. Has lots of text, and the bounce rate of my site was about 90%. This tells me most people looked at the site, and probably didn’t even read the text. The Twitter search, that doesn’t require authentication, is a section I think would be really appealing, no one even saw it. I think my next plan is to move the search to being the front page, though I am concerned that might detract from people catching on to the primary purpose of the site.

If your side project can be done primarily with javascript, appengine make a great host.

90% of the interaction with www.choip.me is static html. There’s a couple pages where I use gaeutilities session, but for the most part today viewers rarely saw those pages. As a result I used 0.08 of my 6.5 CPU hours and 0.02 of my 1GB of bandwidth. Even if I did get a lot more traffic, I’d still be well within my free limits. That’s the power of YUI to create a nice interface, and YQL to act as an information source using YUI. I would like to point out that for a serious application I’d never make it reliant on javascript enabled browsers. Heck, I work with a guy that leaves javascript off in his browser. That’s enough a reason for me right there. However, for a quick one off project, it’s fine.

Summary

Choip.me isn’t going anywhere. I’ll probably do a few tweaks, such as the ones mentioned above, then go back to my primary project. Overall I got a lot more familiar with YUI, and I still have some more ideas for choip.me that I may get to later. Most concentrating on making it more viral at the expense of some performance. Anyway, if your read this entire thing, thank you. I’ll ask now, if you have any feedback I’d be really interested in reading it. Everything above is based on analytics information rather than feedback, because I didn’t ask in the first place. If I’ve made some incorrect assumptions, please correct me. Feel free to use the Disqus comments below, or I’ll be posting this on Hacker News (as it’s seems to be the site people actually read) and will check the comments there also.