From idea to 20k hits in 7 days
Developed and launched last weekend, CSS Pivot received an interesting amount of initial attention. This post is brief summary of what happend, how many visitors we got, what we make of the results and what we plan as next steps.
CSS Pivot allows anyone add CSS to any website and share the new variation with others via a short link, which has the potential to transform the process of collaborating on website improvements in many situations. It has a simple, very easy to use interface and works with all browsers even without javascript. If you haven’t yet seen it, you may enjoy a few examples: Metafilter, Readability, Pro-Android peut-être, Reddit (tip: click on the icon to toggle between the original and the custom css).
.
Backend
CSS Pivot is written in Python and runs on AppEngine, initially set up with html5-boilerplate and appengine-boilerplate, which implements html5-boilerplate and provides a base setup with OpenID, memcache and other often used functionality for AppEngine.
The websites are loaded in an iframe, after they went through our proxy which injects the CSS styles into the html document. This requires to decode the html-document, which works well for all UTF-8 encoded Unicode documents, but easily breaks on other encodings if they are not explicitly declared. If the document consists of another encoding, the proxy can detect the character encoding if it is provided as part of the html headers.
Launching
After the initial prototype seemed to work by Saturday afternoon, and a friend contributed to the design with a first logo and homepage layout, we we showed it to the first outside users viaIRC (#forrst-chat and #startups). The feedback was very encouraging, and people recommended to post a link to HN and Forrst, which we did.
The response was astonishing — it quickly rose to #1 on the frontpage of Hacker News where it stayed for almost 24 hours (and received more than 200 upvotes, 100 comments), and received a ton of likes and comments on Forrst. The website received 10,000 visitors on Sunday, 5,000 on Monday, and slightly over 2,000 for the last three days. Here are a few details from of Google Analytics:
90% of visitors were using CSS3 and HTML5 compatible browsers:
Most common operating systems were Windows (42%), Macintosh (41%), iOS+Android (9%), Desktop Linux (8%). That’s more mobile devices than Linux desktops!
.
Post Launch
Since launching the team behind CSS Pivot grew from one to three people (Chris, Doug and Niclas, who have a mixed background in development and design). We met via Forrst and HN and are now pushing CSS Pivot to the next level together. Major improvements that are already live include many design improvements by Doug, for instance the new headerbar when viewing a pivot, a starring system and a ton of other small improvements.
There are many ideas for the future which we are both evaluating and implementing, in particular a redesign of the frontpage, extending the use-szenarious (eg inviting friends to share pivots for your own website), showing a tree of pivots with their forks and ancestors, and implementing additional functionality for registered users. CSS Pivot could furthermore be a great platform for interactive CSS tutorials for beginners and more advanced users. All of this (and more) will be approached during the coming weeks. As always we greatly appreciate your feedback!
Considering the reaction of people we believe we are on to something here, and we’ll try our best to execute well during the coming weeks and months. You should follow us on Twitter (we also post great new pivots there), give CSS Pivot a try, and let us know about your ideas and feedback!
