The Yew Review
News and Video Aggregator for Surfers
An old consulting client approached me in desperate need of help taking over my old project after my replacement quit. I accepted. For 6 months I gave up the little free time I had been working on YewReview for some cash. I'm not convinced that was the wrong decision, but it was a pretty massive setback for sure. That more or less wrapped in January and I've been very stoked to pick up where I left off.
I've added a few core features since last year - likes and bookmarks, automated open graph metadata extraction of submitted links, and user profiles to show the articles that have been posted, liked, and bookmarked.
I feel like it's functional enough to start asking for feedback. I think I've probably got another couple months of refinement and then I'm planning to start on 3 things to hopefully start building an audience: 1) social media integration 2) automated content tagging 3) basic SEO
It took nearly a year to produce this embarrassingly simple site, but considering I became a new dad a year ago, I work full time, and had to completely relearn web development - I'm ok with that timeline. (btw: good grief web dev has changed since ~2007-08)
I really love surfing. I'm awful, but it's by far my favorite thing to do. I started with the idea that I'd build a really excellent curated newsletter for surfing content, and eventually generate that newsletter completely automatically. I'm currently a data scientist in my day job, and I've done enough NLP and trend analysis/forecasting that it seemed feasible. After spending a couple months manually curating the content and writing and rewriting web scrapers, I decided that the newsletter wasn't the best way to start.
In December I pivoted to the idea of a surfing content aggregator, inspired heavily by sites like Nomad List, BetaList, Product Hunt, Pod Hunt, Women Make, etc. I figure this is a faster route to build an audience, and a simple and natural step towards an automated newsletter.
The list of beta features this site doesn't do yet is long. Likes? Https? Password reset? Comments? User profile? Settings? URL paths other than /? Search? Tags? Any concept of a business model to potentially break even?
All in due time. I'm forcing myself to push it live and start sharing it with other surfers. My excitement for FINALLY launching a side project rather than giving up yet again has overridden my sense of professionalism as a software developer.
Stay tuned for a beta version that may actually look like a real web site...
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Hey Dave,
How’s this project coming along? I’d love to see what it looks like based on your description!
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Hey Joseph - the thing that was broken is fixed now lol. There's still a few simple UX things that have to be fixed, but I'm getting closer 👍 There's not much to ask for feedback on, but if you have any ideas of "you definitely should add X" that would be awesome
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It's going like molasses! The list of distractions is long, but I at the very least I check my todo list every day. It's actually broken right now after pushing some changes two days ago, but I should have it ironed out asap. I'll ping you when it's back up 👍
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