Ask HN: Thoughts on side-project?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4955787
by seanalex • 14 years ago
5 5 14 years ago

My wife and I have been working on it for a few months in our spare time and have ironed out a lot of the last-minute changes/bug-fixes recently. The website is www.realityblock.com and we actually have not shown this to anyone just yet.

We both are huge reality TV fans, but we noticed there truly wasn't one major community or site that drives social discussion and news content for reality shows. We figured we could try and create one and give a unique experience. After looking at Wordpress and test-driving Drupal for a while, we decided to start from scratch and build our own custom system. The idea was to apply it to a niche subject that caters to both of our interests for a testing ground. The whole idea behind it was to try and create something new and original, learn a full technology stack, and just get to work and create it.

The major thing that sets apart our site from any other random social-news site is probably our live-commenting system. It's engineered to be single-threaded in order to handle incoming new comments properly. This allows a reader to not have to refresh the page in order to get the latest comments. The other goal of this also is to have seamless episode discussions as its being aired on TV. Also, at the moment we prefer to not have any ads.

There are a lot of features that are left to be developed down the road, but we wanted to get the basics complete. I'm not a professional web developer or freelancer, so this is truly my first website. If you have any questions about the technology stack or anything at all, let me know. Thanks for any thoughts or suggestions.

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