My one suggestion would be to add an "additional resources" section under the more hackable products with links to relevant GitHub repos or blog posts.
Thanks for the suggestions. I like the idea of additional resources. I was also thinking of trying find things on sites like Instructables that use the products I find. Including links to little projects like the one shown in the USB missile link would certainly add a lot of value for the visitors.
Have to be careful with some things like lock picks. Various state laws can make having such things troublesome. Sure, most of the laws have something requiring the intent to commit a crime, but if someone gets the wrong idea, it's rather hard to prove that you had no such intent.
DealExtreme.com and similar might be worth picking some of that stuff up from. Mostly crap but hard to beat for odd screwdrivers and the like.
Oh, and add a "Don't show me things from stores that won't ship to my region lest I become consumed with envy and curse the very name of newegg.com" checkbox, perhaps :-).
I really recommend it. I bought that one myself a few months ago. It's very cool! The guy who runs the site is awesome and he'll help you out if you have any questions. He can't ship the N2O canisters outside of his country though (or maybe it was just to the US) so you'll have to find a place around you that sells them. Not too hard to find though.
Not just you -- that was totally the idea. Nothing says 'hacker' like that particular shade of orange. It also helps because I made this site for the HN community (for the most part, figured only you guys would understand it). What better way to identify with my fellow HNers?
Sugru is the business. I love the stuff. Last night (with one small sachet) I added a focus confirmation chip to a manual SLR lens, replaced two missing feet of my netbook, filled in an annoying embossed Belkin logo on my iPhone case and added a big colourful zip pull to my camera bag.
(Talk about "cure for disposable income"... they're actually great to type on once you get used to it; they're just not worth $300).
By the way, this is a delightful and simple site; I signed up for the newsletter, and I want to give you my money somehow. For what it's worth, I wouldn't bat an eyelash at affiliate links. I agree with joshu that curation is a huge value-add. In mere minutes, just based on the design of the site and the content on it right now, you have gained my trust! Treat it well and benefit from it.
Nifty. Like the minimalist design. I reckon what it really needs is some kind of subtle recommendation filter based either on like/dislike (interesting/boring?) buttons or just on what items you bother to click through to. Maybe a little (X) button to say take-it-away-and-don't-show-me-it-ever-again.
PS: Go ahead and put affiliate links on it, its got to pay for itself somehow. IMHO affiliate links are less obnoxious than ads taking up room. Just make sure you don't let the affiliate income bias your selections too much, or the usefulness of the site will be degraded.
Thanks for the suggestions! RE: the PS, my friend and I were just discussing this. That was my biggest issue, that my judgement would be clouded or that people might believe that my judgement was being clouded.
Great ideas! Thanks for contributing -- I hadn't thought of that. And yes. I think the site is going to need a Lisp book. Possibly Haskell as well. I want to keep the normals off there as long as possible. ;)
I've seen a couple of sites like this that have done well generating traffic from niche forum banner ads (http://toppppp.com is the one that sprints to mind immediately).
My worry with these types of passive income sites is the upkeep for pricing information. The OP's source looks like he's manually printed the price, and the same with my example except their prices are quite out of date by now. Does anyone have any ideas how best to scrape the price from the 3rd party site?
Yep, I have to manually keep track of the pricing. It's going to be a pain as the site grows. Growing pain I suppose. I don't showcase very many retailers. It wouldn't be difficult to write a simple Python script to fetch the product pages for the retailers I carry the most items from and automatically update the price. I can take care of the rest by hand.
Word of warning: DO NOT buy the rechargeable USB batteries. They are very cheap and leaked acid (I owned two). Also, they do not hold a charge for more than a day in my experience. You'd be better off with regular rechargeable batteries.
How about including a mechanism for reviews like this on the site? (I know most of the linked to sites have review areas as well but having it all in one place in your curated venue might add some value).
I don't really have a plan at all, to be honest. I don't plan on putting affiliate links or ads on it ever. I just wanted to put up a simple showcase of products for like-minded people. It's sort of my hacker answer to ThisIsWhyImBroke.com.
My point is that I think you are free to make money. If you can do it without compromising your sense of quality you will go very far.
Well, not necessarily tags, but I want to dive deeper in some things. You should allow that.
I like the idea of having a web page that's the opposite of sites that make me email some jackass to get a price. These are all buyable things, RIGHT NOW.
You should have a giant page of SBCs. And UAVs. And 3d printing things. And useful software. Free or otherwise! I think the iphone game Trainyard might appeal to hackers, for example...
I'm gonna order the panograph tomorrow, I think...
Good idea. I think you've got a good idea of what I'm trying to add to the site (especially with the SBCs and UAVs). Adding individual pages based on interest would be a major improvement. Apps is another great idea.
I'm considering the idea of cutting deals with retailers (or even manufacturers) if the site reaches critical mass. I mean, I'm not averse to making money. I just hadn't planned on it.
Huh, the temperature-sensitive glass [1] featured on the home page seems backwards. The coolest parts are red, and the hottest parts, blue. (This violates color theory and standard heat maps.)
At $33/each, they're also astoundingly expensive to buy from this site; by my calculations, one wall of the shower featured in this photo cost a minimum of $4,620 in tiling alone:
Yes, inventables.com has some really cool stuff, but they are sometimes too expensive. For example, the "Super absorbent polymer spheres" [1] are also available from ThinkGeek for a lot less [2] (And you'll probably get them elsewhere even cheaper)
> • Tiles that appear black at room temperature and move through the color
> spectrum when temperature (warm water, radiant heat, etc.) is applied.
Now I want a shower curtain thats translucent when in ambient temperature, then turns (red/green/white/black/whatever) while the shower is on (hot water).
Under "existing uses" on that page they show examples of how it really looks (which should be correct I think). Inventables photoshops a lot of their images. They might have just touched that one up as well.
HackerThings recently posted a widget I created (the ATX Power Supply to Bench Supply). In a few days I'll post a writeup of traffic (or sales, if any, none so far) mainly for the benefit of coderdude.
And from the comments, I suppose some of the next few features you may want to add would be:
1. a way for users to recommend products
2. a way for users to LIKE and DISCUSS products
1. Absolutely. I've been getting great suggestions through multiple channels (in this thread, through Twitter, my personal email, etc.). It would be great if visitors could suggest something right on the site.
2. That would be ideal. I might end up creating a comment system similar to the one on HN. Something barebones that just works. I would very much like to add some interactivity to the site.
I may do that instead. It would be nice to take advantage of the various auth systems without requiring me to implement Twitter and Facebook (et al) myself. That's the only reason I might choose a canned system over something homegrown though.
This is pretty neat, but it'd be more useful if it had some basic category filtering. That way I could filter out all the electrical engineery stuff from the other stuff, for example.
Definitely some good advice. Although I probably won't make it like a blog, I do agree that each item should be linkable. That's something I wish I'd done before submitting it. Hindsight! But those are all features I think I should incorporate as soon as possible.
Oh god, love it. The ultimate cure for disposable income.
One suggestion, which may be unpopular: As many cool "let's build stuff" ideas as I get when browsing sites like this, a tag or filter for stuff that is complete, ready-to-use products would be helpful, as I already have too many PCBs scattered around and most times should only be buying complete products that can actually improve my life directly.
I will update it daily -- at least I'll try. It depends on whether or not I can find things that are a good enough fit each day. I want to update it with 3 new items per day. The number of items I showcase will grow. I haven't decided on how I want to handle this yet. I'm thinking the items will need to be split into categories and the front page will just be newest or most popular items.
Nicely done. I'm looking forward to seeing more web-stores that just link to other websites for the checkout process. Does this have a name? Product curating?
Question: do you make money from affiliations and if not, do you plan to?
The site looks great, full of stuff I'm now trying not to buy...
How to plan to make money from the site? I guessed that the links would be tracked to affiliate schemes but they just look like straight links to the retailers' sites
As long as you don't compromise the content of the site (i.e. only promoting products that earn you the greatest award) it could be worth considering at some time, even if it just makes you some beer money.
This complaining about facebook is getting ridiculous.
No, it's not. What's ridiculous is the way Facebook treats privacy. If you're OK with that, and are happy to see it promoted by propagating Facebook bugs, that's your choice.
People who find it offensive, though, need to speak up and let site owners know that they do not approve of Facebook's behavior.
I assume that any site with a FB "like" button is OK with Facebook's "privacy" policy.
Whatever your thoughts I can't understand encouraging acquiescence through silence. That's also ridiculous,
James has done a great job with Hacker Things, but if he wants to put a Facebook tracking item on the site for whatever promotional gain then he should be doing so with true deliberation, knowing that it will put off some number of users.
I didn't down vote you (don't have enough karma,but even if I did I still wouldn't), but I can explain my opinion better.
First the disclaimer: Personally I find the complaining over Facebook's privacy concerns exaggerated and sensationalized (I don't think it's that big of a deal).
That being said, I think it's absolutely fine to not agree with Facebook's privacy policies or have your own personal concerns. I also think it's completely reasonable not to use the site and even to tell others that you have some concerns over their policies.
What I think is excessive though, is complaining about it on an unrelated post about something that has nothing to do with Facebook and saying a simple tag 'leaves a bad taste'. Especially considering a Facebook tag on a different site has nothing to do with their policies.
What I think is excessive though, is complaining about it on an unrelated post about something that has nothing to do with Facebook and saying a simple tag 'leaves a bad taste'. Especially considering a Facebook tag on a different site has nothing to do with their policies.
I would not have brought up FB if I did not think it was germane to the post. This is a "Hey, HN people, what do you think of my site?" post. The site includes a FB bug in the form of the "like" button that makes it easier for FB to track people across sites. That diminishes the site for me. I'm less concerned with the Twitter button precisely because of the difference in company privacy policies and past behavior.
When people build sites and decide to tranclude content from other domains they need to make a deliberate decision about what that means. If you willingly associate your site with some other site then the expectation is that you're good with what they do and how they do it.
I like that analogy. However, I'd say it's more like if SparkFun and ThinkGeek were a couple, but then it turned out Inventables was the real dad and ThinkGeek only got visitation on the weekends.
One suggestion, mechanical keyboards.
Das Model S http://www.daskeyboard.com/model-s-professional-silent/
Topre Realforce Tenkeyless http://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=topre_keyboards,r...
Happy Hacking http://www.elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=pfu_keyboards...