HN user

thehodge

5,449 karma

I am @thehodge - http://thehodge.co.uk I am cofounder of https://littlewarden.com https://www.dresscircle.co.uk

You can contact me on hackernews@hodgetastic.com

Posts89
Comments440
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freedomainideas.com 2y ago

Show HN: Free Domain Ideas – Simple & Quick Domain Name Generator

thehodge
2pts2
freedomainalerts.com 2y ago

Show HN: Free Domain Alerts – Free Domain and SSL Expiration Alerts

thehodge
3pts1
twitter.com 3y ago

“This is absolutely related to Twitter not paying their Google Cloud bills”

thehodge
18pts9
www.dresscircle.co.uk 4y ago

Show HN: Dress Circle – IMDB for UK Theatre

thehodge
77pts36
www.saasframe.io 6y ago

SaaS Inspiration Showcase

thehodge
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Best Resources for SaaS UX / UI Design

thehodge
16pts4
blog.digitalocean.com 8y ago

Onward and Upward Together (DigitalOcean CEO Stepping Down)

thehodge
17pts0
medium.com 8y ago

From £4M to Broke: This Is Our Startup Horror Story

thehodge
2pts0
thehodge.co.uk 8y ago

UK Bank replaces logout functionality with advert

thehodge
2pts1
littlewarden.com 8y ago

Show HN: Little Warden, monitoring the tedious things about websites

thehodge
109pts30
www.theregister.co.uk 8y ago

Court puts Basho into receivership

thehodge
1pts0
verelox.com 9y ago

“an ex administrator has deleted all customer data and wiped most servers”

thehodge
5pts1
www.startupschool.org 9y ago

Startup School Registration is open

thehodge
3pts1
www.bloomberg.com 9y ago

Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

thehodge
277pts176
www.theregister.co.uk 10y ago

UK Hosting provider accidentally deletes all customers websites

thehodge
5pts3
twittercommunity.com 10y ago

Twitter to remove JSON shared count endpoint next month

thehodge
4pts0
ifc0nfig.com 11y ago

Moonpig vulnerability

thehodge
17pts1
www.brightbox.com 11y ago

Orbit: Our new Geo-redundant Object Store

thehodge
15pts0
www.theverge.com 12y ago

OKCupid asks users to boycott Firefox because of CEO's gay rights stance

thehodge
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Ask HN: Password sharing for remote teams

thehodge
2pts4
brightbox.com 12y ago

Brightbox announce 50% price drop for outbound data (and make inbound free)

thehodge
1pts1
www.found.no 12y ago

Play - JSFiddle for ElasticSearch

thehodge
73pts6
www.glitchthegame.com 12y ago

Art & Code from the Glitch Game Released into Public Domain

thehodge
23pts1
orchardup.com 12y ago

Host your Docker containers in the cloud

thehodge
27pts5
blog.qwiki.com 13y ago

Yahoo buys Qwiki

thehodge
2pts0
plus.google.com 13y ago

Google now treats .io as a generic tld

thehodge
2pts2
thehodge.co.uk 13y ago

The other side of working for yourself

thehodge
70pts36
shopify.github.com 13y ago

Dashing - A dashboard framework

thehodge
419pts84
thehodge.co.uk 13y ago

Sick of SEO Scumbags

thehodge
167pts126
www.thinkstartups.com 13y ago

Show HN : ThinkStartups - A Startup Unconference

thehodge
26pts8

Hey HN,

14 years ago on HN a domain name generator launched called Impossibility (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1874465), as a bloke with a fair few side projects I really enjoyed the speed and simplicity

The site shut down a few years ago (and the domain name was bought by a porn site hence @dang having to remove the URL) and I've not found a service that replicates it to my liking.

So, I rebuilt it, I've got a few tweaks still to make but I'm pleased with the current speed and simplicity of it.

Hey HN, Dom here, since the launch of https://littlewarden.com on Show HN a few years ago, we've added a lot of new features but we've always wanted to have a free tier (to get some attention).

We decided that going back and making LW work with thousands of free users wouldn't be the best use of our time but we could use the core API of Little Warden and build another website from it thus Free Domain Alerts was born.

Simon (and Nat of course) are one of the most inspirational (smartest and loveliest) couples I've encountered in all the weird tech events..

Their honeymoon, creation of Lanyrd and then eventual sale was a lovely story to follow over the years (and it's certainly part of an inspiration to our latest project)

Here's to 20 more years of blogging!

Thanks for the feedback! You are right that it’s not “exactly” the same use case but it’s certainly an easy way to pitch it!

I really want to highlight smaller and regional productions as well as larger west end ones (that’s why our recommendations system is designed not to focus on budget ;) )

Awards are on the development list but I want to really think about ones which could have an impact to the production rather than quickly throwing some up!

That's a very fair point, honestly not the first thing we thought of when building the website (as the initial intention was only for my wife and I to have lists but certainly something I'm going to look into and work on.

Less than 5% of the links we have are affiliate links, a few sites in the industry we noticed will only list venues that give a kickback, but we want to list everything and we've got a few other ideas of monetisation later down the link (the small number of affiliate links we have at the moment are working pretty well).

A ticketing solution is certainly one of the options we have, especially for the smaller productions which are in makeshift theatres (a fair few in working mens clubs!)

We do have unique ID's for each production (and have already had to deal with avoiding duplication of shows with the same name) but linking to Wikidata is a good shout!

I've not looked into it fully but since we cover a lot of Fringe and Amateur productions they might not be in Wikidata and those will tend to have a higher duplication factor.

There is no scraping (at the moment) it's all manually input to avoid issues, every theatre website is different (and a lot of them are terrible) but we are getting on a lot of press distribution lists so the next stage it to see if we can automate the parsing of those emails.

Thanks for the comments re: pitch, it was a fun day and looking forward to next year

Hey HN!,

My wife and I have created Dress Circle.

The idea behind Dress Circle came from a Google Doc I've had for years with every show (Play, Musical, Opera) I've seen in ranked order, eventually we translated it into a webpage (https://www.dresscircle.co.uk/+thehodge) so others could view it and then friends wanted their own list.

To enable features such as alerts and showcases, we started to build a database Theatres in the UK then we added the shows that were in them and THEN we added the actors (and creative teams).

Then we started to add historical productions and.. well here we are, we've accidentally built IMDB for UK Theatre

(I thought with the timezone this might be a good time to post)