Donel.ist

Two weeks after a middling launch on IH/HN/Reddit/PH, I'm sitting pretty at just over 50 recurring users. Looking at analytics, it looks like almost all of 'em came from Hacker News -- which is no real surprise, since almost all the traffic to the https://donel.ist landing page has come from one Show HN and a couple upvoted comments on productivity-related discussions.

Peeking at analytics, it looks like those 50+ users are coming back daily to log new items to their done lists; a few of them have even set up public lists that are getting non-trivial traffic of their own!

Product Hunt, Hacker News, Reddit -- and of course, Indie Hackers. Donel.ist is 100% free and right now I don't have any plans to monetise it -- let's see how folks use it and who else finds it useful.

Fingers crossed that someone else finds it half as useful as I do!

One of the last things I wanted to get into Donel.ist before launching was a power-user feature for (fellow) web devs: a REST API for reading/writing your own done list. I've already got machine-readable feeds (RSS/Atom/Jsonfeed) but I wanted an API-driven workflow, too.

I finished writing the API (that was the fun part!) last week; this week I finally got off my ass and wrote some documentation at https://donel.ist/developer. First time I've written dev docs in...a long while.

I tagged the first item as "done" in Donel.ist today, and launched it silently just so it would be there for me to use. My plan is to use it for a month and see if I stick with it; if so, I'll polish it as I go along until I think it's ready for the world -- and once I've used it for a while I'll be able to say, with confidence, why I find it useful.