Product Habits

@hnshah One of my goals this year was to work with more makers to launch their ideas. I didn't think it would be @hnshah, but Twitter has a magical way of making things happen that you didn't think were possible 😀 It was great to work with Hiten and Marie on building Product News, they have a great passion for anything product related and it shows any time you're talking with them.

It's pretty simple. @mubashariqbal built a three part system: 1. Sources: We are able to add sources. Blogs via RSS, Medium Authors, Medium Publications and Twitter accounts. 2. Queue: Posts and tweets from the sources are added to a queue and they can be rejected or published. There is an option to edit the post headline and description as well. 3. Public Page: This is the front-end interface everyone sees. Once a post is published, it shows up on the public page at the top.

@hnshah Just to add a little more technical detail: The system was custom built using the Laravel PHP framework. We use RSS feeds, Twitter and Medium APIs to gather the content for curation. // @smalter

@hnshah @mubashariqbal that curation tool sounds useful! @zhu_mink and i built www.keysheet.io, which curates expert reviews of cryptocurrencies. our data set that we curate from is very similar, which is specific individuals on twitter, medium and personal websites. currently, our curation tools are: - we add twitter handles to twitter lists and search those lists with copy-pasted search queries. - we add medium sites and personal websites to a google custom search engine we created. we have to 'pull' reviews via search, then if we find a good one, we enter them manually into an airtable form we created which stores it into our airtable base (which is actually the production db for the site). @mubashariqbal i will dm you. would love to talk more about the curation backend to what you built if you're game!

@hnshah @smalter @mubashariqbal Great work guys. I have a question on your stack. (heads' up – I love both Laravel and Wordpress). I'd love to know why you didn't choose Wordpress, did you consider it at all, or go straight to Laravel? Or re-use old code from another project? Wordpress via REST could have been a good happy-medium. I'm genuinely curious, because I've been making the Laravel vs. Wordpress call quite a bit lately.

@hnshah @smalter @joetannorella I guess I made the decision here, I went with Laravel mostly for the backend system that I knew I wanted to build. The aggregation of content from a variety of different sources (Medium, Twititer, RSS) and more in the future that we don't about yet. I also wanted a very simple interface to review and publish or reject that content. Could it have been done in Wordpress, yes! I've built similar things in Wordpress in the past too, but I feel like the aggregation and administration would have been more complicated.

@ross thanks! I'm curious about what signals you want to see.

@graham_robson I've looked into things like search and classifications. Even done user testing on prototypes with features like that. A small percentage of folks come back regularly for that type of depth. Currently Product News solves the most ubiquitous problem that exists with content, finding stuff worth reading.

@graham_robson Additionally, if you want to check out an older archive of links that is searchable and classified, the product habits team and I did put this together a while ago https://airtable.com/universe/ex... but we haven't updated it in a bit.

@hnshah Many Thanks! This is very good of you to provide. It's also interesting to know that there isn't so much of a demand for more than a now-term resource. It certainly more habit forming to find the time to read, as you might miss something. I can see how it can encourage your own curation processes.

@pradipcloud Thanks, rage tweeting on Twitter about the weather worked out well :)

@andrewaskins I'm excited too! It was fun building an idea I've always wanted to see exist.