I think its pretty cool that they are offering suggestions and criticisms. It shows that this is something they were interested in seeing and learning about and it also shows they care about the quality of the output on this article more than others. Just about every article on HN has a few typos but it is seldom mentioned: I'm not completely sure what this means, but I'm veering toward positive thoughts.

Overall, the comments and emails I received are great. The link to the Clojure talk is really good. The suggestions are all well-intended and interesting. I guess I have to be a tad more careful of the code examples and I guess there is some interest in seeing Clojure versions as well. Lots to ponder on and all quite valuable.

Judging from the hourly measurement, it looks like the article fell off the front page about an hour ago. Right now there's about 5k hits. Last hour there was about 150 views compared to the 300 to 700 / hr views. Interesting to see how it all went viral across social media, other sites, and shared email for a short time. The insight is quite amazing from a marketing perspective.

That's the material for your next (not super technical) post right there. Analyze that stuff, I'd be interested to see a blogpost on that.

for(ii = 0; ii < 1; ii++)

And it gets worse:

http://www.daniweb.com/software-deve...-in-my-program

I thought HN was loaded with posts talking about the results of their front-page articles. Not sure if I'd be able to bring anything unique or interesting tbh.

EDIT TO ADD:

I mean, the obvious is the hits. There's quite a few HN bots that tweet about all the trending articles, which accounts for about 10% of the views. Then there are tons of aggregation feeds that follow HN, Reddit, etc. Then Tumblr and facebook, then there are people still tweeting the article to their followers as we speak. There's some really strange urls that suggest people are loading the link to their company servers (to share w/ coworkers or read at work?). Seems like the concept really resonates with people. I'm sure that Gull can add more interesting items here since he is focusing on conversion as well.

2ND EDIT:

I'm surprised at how many people returned to read the page as well. So far, it's around 5%. I'm also pleased that the average read is around 25 minutes. It really is a long article, and it's neat to think people are really taking the time to understand it. I guess I can't really put up the next article until next weekend because it is not a good one for general working hours.

Nice brag dave It's a great feeling writing something, and then knowing that thousands of people have read it.

I looked for it on HN but can't find it, can you link me?

i first learned about the circle of fifths from this book:
http://home.earthlink.net/~codybird/...hing/Home.html

i forget where it was recommended, but i remember reviews of kids following this book and passing all types of music tests much easier than normal schooling, as well as being able to improv much quicker

they explained it similar to you with the whole and half steps, although theirs was much easier to follow for a music beginner. also helped me understand why these were important and how they can be used to create music

Can someone link me to DaveT's article... seem to have missed it on HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4827415

Pretty interesting!

Thanks

Anyone have any exp with Titanium for app development? If so, any thoughts on benefits/drawbacks? I'm thinking of using it instead of obj-c for some projects. I've made a few apps in obj-c, but I've heard I can get stuff out the door a lot of quicker using Titanium.

I used Titanium for a small weather app. This was a 100% hobby project, the app was very small and I cant claim to have any 'real experience' with Titanium. But...

Although developing in HTML/JavaScript and having your app compile on multiple platforms sounds like a great idea, and although it sounds like your development time will be cut in half... tread VERY carefully.

Titanium itself is not bug free, and I very quickly ran into several issues because Titanium had not been updated to a recently released version of IOS.

The JavaScript/HTML interface can be tricky to work with. It was very difficult to get everything to show up in the correct place on the app.

The app was SLOW. Very slow. I had a really simple animation on my app which showed snowflakes if it was snowing, or raindrops if it was raining. This very simple animation used a ton of resources.

Once I had the app working ok for iOS, I tried to port it to android. Titanium tells you this is pretty much a 1 click process. Its not. Parts of the API are specific to iOS/Andriod, and you have to put a lot of if {IOS} .... else if {Android} ... in your code. Also, the screen layouts for different for android, so I had to completely re-write the layout code.

A lot of the above are pitfalls that could be avoided if you know about them in advance, but my advice would be to do a LOT of research before you decide to use Titanium. There are certainly some advantages to using it, but make sure you are aware of all the drawbacks.

Excellent example of this is the Facebook iOS app http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebo...51036091753920

@daveT - I just noticed none of the pages on your site have <title></title> tags in the <head> element... I believe these are used quite heavily for SEO, so probably worth adding.

Edit: This isnt a criticism btw... just an fyi

That's good advice. I sort of slopped the site together. I have to do a bit of face-lifting and fix a few things in the program itself. I'm not going to add a comment box though. I'm just not that excited to add one. I'll probably push the next article this upcoming weekend since the average read of this article is 25 minutes and it wouldn't be good for work time.

Kind of surprised that no one commented on the new HTML5 elements. The most interesting part is seeing how nearly 50% of the readers read the site on a mobile device. It was not created with any intent for mobile users. Considering 10% of the visits are returning, I wonder how many people on mobile devices decided to see it on a regular screen. I have no idea how I could make this mobile-friendly. Just too much and formatting certain areas doesn't seem possible. I looked on my own mobile phone and it turned out okay.

What do guys think of the Choose Your Own Adventure bit? I'm thinking about sending that part through the shredder.

The next article will have to start with the why of starting at the Circle instead of somewhere else, then derive the Minor keys with shortcuts lest it becomes redundant. Then the next article will complete the programming part.

There is another book that starts up with some of what I wrote but doesn't give the ideas a thorough treatment like I have it. http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Music-Th.../dp/1854724479

I've seen it explained like I have it here, and most certainly not for free on the internet. I already had this figured out and when I saw the AB book have it, I was like "Finally!"

I'm also attempting to hit a very large target: programmers who probably don't know anything all about music theory, musicians who are aware of it and never tried, as well as musicians who tried but struggled. The feedback seems to be the most positive from the third type of person, which is to be expected.

I'd cut it. I think its a testament to how interesting the rest of your article is that I forgot all about that part. It was kind of rambly and as I was reading it I didn't know where you were going and even now I'm not really sure why its there.

This is quite awesome. I think the best part is the ~500 line function that does nothing but inputs some numbers and outputs them in a (poorly formatted) grid.

@daveT
the links in your "About" section seem to be broken

Yeah, the one is broken. I'm migrating that one site to AppFog right now. Much more painful than it should be esp. when you aren't in the mood. Thinking about just converting it to raw PHP and saying f* it.

Most mobile devices can handle a normal webpage just fine... personally, I am not a big fan of different page layout for mobile devices.

I disagree with this. It's a pain of course as a developer, but as a user I would much much rather use a web page written in jquery mobile or something similar than something that wasn't optimized for mobile, even if had correct markup.

Hear hear. Especially if they remove functionality, it's just horrible. I have an iPhone 5 people, don't coddle me like I'm some Blackberry user.

Meanwhile I'm giving Bootstrap a try myself for some Wordpress sites I'm rebuilding this month. Should be interesting.

+1

most (good) mobile sites have a link at the bottom to "use full page version"

IMO designing a page to be viewable on both mobile and web > maintaining 2 different page styles. Twitter Bootstrap does this very well.

In theory this sounds great, and maintaining 2 pages sucks for sure. In practice I've found you sacrifice the quality of one or the other. Which may be okay depending on your use case.