Rodrigo Neri created Syte while re-building his own website (above) over the past three weeks.
“I did not expect to have a lot of traction at all,” Rodrigo Neri said around noon today, a little more than 12 hours after releasing Syte, an open-sourced personal website that offers social integrations. “I was just hoping a few people would use it.”
Neri, who’s had success attracting more than a million users to his app myHomework, blogged about his latest creation around 9:30 p.m. on Monday. Thirty minutes later, he posted it to Hacker News – a social news site frequented by developers – and asked his Twitter followers to give it an upvote. By 11:30, it was in the top spot.
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“All of the sudden a lot of people started voting it up and it ended up getting first place on Hacker News,” Neri said in an email interview. “So it currently has 256 points in Hacker News, the project has been watched 366 times and forked 118 times on Github.” As of 5 p.m. today, it had 284 points on Hacker News.
Like About.me, Syte offers an easy to set-up personal homepage with the option of integrating social networks, such as Twitter and Instagram (Syte loads the feeds in a slide-in popup, pictured left). Syte differs, however, in that it’s an open-sourced project with its code posted to Github, allowing users – who Neri said will need some beginner level web development skills – to run the websites themselves.
Syte came about when Neri was re-building his own website, when he set out to shift his focus from the apps he’s released, which used to dominate his homepage, to the blog posts he’s published.
“I also wanted to put together some of the things I learned over the past couple of years,” Neri said, “so I got some design inspiration from Svbtle Network sites and some social integration inspiration from About.me sites and decided to build it.”
“I got some design inspiration from Svbtle Network sites and some social integration inspiration from About.me sites and decided to build it.” – Rodrigo Neri
Neri added: “One thing I’ve noticed in the past couple of years is that there are a lot of developers and designers that don’t have a personal website. Some that are really talented but just lack the others skills, developers that lack the design skills and designers that lack the developer skills. So I decided to help them, I open-sourced the code and wrote some documentation so they can put their Syte together easily.”
If the Hacker News reactions are an indication of how it’ll be received – for example, “this looks really cool, the world needs more stuff like this” and “great idea and above all great execution.” – Syte’s off to a good start. But if you’re thinking this side project might become something more for Neri – his last side project turned into his current startup – he insists it’s just for fun.
“I think in this day and age personal websites are important for developers and designers to have,” Neri said, “and I think some people will be able to learn from it.”
See an example of Syte on Neri’s website, rigoneri.com, and find it on Github at rigoneri.github.com/syte.
Credits: Screenshots from rigoneri.com.
