Smack tried posting this to Reddit a couple days ago, once again on r/dataisbeautiful. Unfortunately, the mods removed it within a few hours without explaining why. Based on the analytics graph he sent me (if I am reading it correctly), the post seemed to be on the cusp of getting popular again…like last time.
The website is still available here. It now contains optimizations. The backend was rewritten in golang, there are now county lines, optional relative coloring, and the scraped data contains Zillow pricing for the entire United States. Smack even added a range graphic at the bottom.
I was planning to make a series of blog posts about the work I did on the website, but after Smack’s latest update, optimizations, and some back and forth on performance, it’s not really clear how much of what I did (if anything) actually made the cut in the final release. I did do relative coloring, which was inefficient, and I did add county lines…but didn’t color them. Still, I reserve the right to use my blog to talk about whatever I want. I can still post about my work, with a massive asterisk stating that what I did may or may not be the same as what is actually on the Hostinger VPS.
Closing Thoughts
If you think this post was just a lame excuse to farm blog content before Smack tries reposting to Reddit this weekend, then congratulations…you get a cookie.
I realized that as much as I have complained about Medium, they seem to handle SEO pretty well. Add tags like “software development” and “software engineering,” and a Medium post can rank on Google fairly easily. I was dismayed to find that my homesareexpensive.com posts here do not show up on Google at all, and I wanted to try using keywords again.
One thing I realized when looking up homesareexpensive, though, is that its first release actually trended on Twitter. Now that was news for Smack, who does not have Twitter – I myself have not used it in so long that I still thought it was called Twitter.
Most of the comments were good, some were harsh, but Smack seemed happy just to see that people were using it.
