tomjohnneill | 4 years ago | on: When 70M people visit your joke site
It was basically a typo, but then enough people got slightly irritated by it that I started to enjoy having it that way.
tomjohnneill's comments
tomjohnneill | 4 years ago | on: When 70M people visit your joke site
It was a static site cached on Vercel. Not including the map (which is an iframe) the site was less than 100kb.
tomjohnneill | 4 years ago | on: When 70M people visit your joke site
I wrote that up here: https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit...
tomjohnneill | 4 years ago | on: Human taste buds can tell the difference between normal and 'heavy' water
Provided you gain appropriate consent, there are definitely ways in which you can discover exactly how much the taste of these fluids vary from person to person.
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: What Goodreads could have been
Yeah I don't think anyone is ever going to build a better Goodreads from a bookmarking & automated recommendations perspective for exactly that reason. I think there is scope for some nice little niche tools for individuals to recommend books though. Whether that's the one I made in a weekend, seems doubtful, but I think there is a path there.
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Inside a viral website
In hindsight, you're right. And obviously I didn't. However at the time, it was the uncertainty as a result of never having done something like this that made me worried.
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Inside a viral website
For what it's worth (and I know this is getting extremely meta), but as it stands this writeup has had 21,963 visitors from Hacker News. (205 comments as I write this).
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Inside a viral website
The point is that NextJS does create a static site. And Vercel can be just a static CDN, as it was for this.
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Inside a viral website
Damn I wish you hadn't posted. Ah well.
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Inside a viral website
Ha. I came on here to post it myself this time. Turns out I was beaten to it.
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Inside a viral website
So I did in the end apply to Google AdSense just to find out. Turns out the site didn't get approved because it didn't have enough content on it. So I think you would be hard pushed to monetise it quickly by going down the normal display ads route.
I didn't mention in the post, but I had a couple of random ad offers, but they were for things that I didn't really agree with so didn't take up any of the offers.
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Inside a viral website
I only put simple analytics on the site the day after it was at the top of Hacker News (unfortunately)
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Giant Ship Is Moved To and Fro to Break Suction: Suez Update
That was a very stressful decision at 4:30am, so glad it was the right call.
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?
Having just had a site that went to the top of Hacker News and got a very sudden spike of traffic, I'd highly recommend Vercel.
It's super quick to set up, and you can have a mix of static/dynamic content on the same site.
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Is that ship still stuck?
I could, though it would be summarised in about one sentence: "NextJS and Vercel make everything stupidly easy."
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Is that ship still stuck?
I actually have no idea. It was just a bit of fun so I haven't got any logs/analytics set up at all.
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Is that ship still stuck?
Site author here, I guess this is why the New York Times API keeps hitting rate limits.
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: Billionaires Build
He wasn't a billionaire when he started SpaceX:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#:~:text=In%20October....
tomjohnneill | 5 years ago | on: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers (2019)
Something I found fascinating about learning Chinese while living in China was knowing exactly what a character meant (because it was written on signs etc.), but having absolutely no idea how it was pronounced.
tomjohnneill | 6 years ago | on: IBM's Lost Decade
I remember reading an article back in 2011, a puff piece about IBM in the Economist for the company's 100th birthday: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2011/06/09/1100100-and-co...
It's pretty interesting to look at some of the quotes from that article now:
- "As IBM enters its second century in good health, far younger IT giants, such as Cisco Systems, Intel, Microsoft and Nokia, are grappling with market shifts that threaten to make them much less relevant."
- "By 2015 the firm wants its earnings per share almost to double, to “at least” $20." (It was actually $11, and kept falling from there)
- "given the complexity of the world and how much of it is still to be digitised, IBM's human platform looks unlikely to reach its limits soon. Perhaps not for another 100 years."