I spent today building http://setTimeout.net, a website that I was inspired to create yesterday evening.
I set myself the goal of finishing the project in one day, I’ve managed to get done enough in that time period, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I came up with several ideas for how to improve it in the process, namely letting you create a bookmark that immediately saved a page for a set duration without further interaction, and integration with twitter.
The goal of the site is to work like javascript’s setTimeout(); function. You pass it a URL, and a time (in days), and the url will pop up in your news reader after the timeout expires. It’s useful if you want to check on the status of a project, but it isn’t interesting enough to monitor constantly, or if you find an interesting website that isn’t loading.
It’s very minimal in a lot of ways, and that’s sort of the point. It’s actually fairly easy to interface with: you give it data in one end, and when the timeout expires it spits them out as rss. I’m considering spending another day at some point to allow it to push data when the timeout expires, or to provide alternative interfaces to the resulting pages.