[jraines]

I sell lift tickets at a ski resort. Some of our ticket windows are not at the main resort & get about 5 customers on a slow day.

Last week I built this: www.feedstomper.com

I also get to ski for free at 3 of the top resorts in the U.S. Pretty awesome so far.

[fallentimes]

That's awesome. Have you ever been caught working on your side projects? What happened (if applicable)?

[jraines]

Actually they are cool with it. Me and one other guy request the slow windows, everyone else hates them. He does consulting for restaurants, working up business plans and processes.

[gravitycop]

Off-topic, but is there a reason they don't use ski-lift-ticket vending machines, at least at the slow windows where the per-ticket labor cost of manual vending must undoubtedly be rather high? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_Ski_Area#Recent_developmen...

Eventually, users will be able to track their vertical and lift ride data online and purchase Alta Cards using "ticket vending machines".

[jraines]

We do have them, but a lot of people either don't notice them or would prefer to buy from a person. We also sell lesson packages, redeem special discount vouchers, do will-call, and answer questions.

However, I do wonder sometimes if the offsite windows are economical.

[gravitycop]

Based on what you said in that first paragraph, I predict that in five years the average ski resort will have less than half as many employees as it does today. People may tend to prefer to deal with in-person people, but this competes against the value provided by automation and tele-help (e.g. questions can be routed to centralized, inexpensive call-centers).

[glenstein]

Your feedstomper service rules. I'm using it for Ask Metafilter, and I'll probably use it for a host of others.

[jraines]

Thanks man. I've been encouraged by the response so far, but also nervous. Let me know if you have any problems -- it's worked on all feeds I've tested except one: the friendfeed 'best-of-day' feed, which is both voluminous and heavy on html.

I'm going to make a few more tweaks tonight and try to get some more feedback from HN.

[glenstein]

Hey, me again.

After having used your service for a bit, I wanted to say that the single biggest pain is that title of a feed item looks identical to the description text of the feed above it, so it kind of looks like the description text just has a line break and some more text, not like a new item has started. So the items all seem to bleed into one another.

Perhaps get rid of the "Link" and make the title a link to the item itself? Or seperate each item with an <hr>?

One other thing. Is there a better way to store feeds than feedstomper.com/82.xml? I imagine that will be a ton of processing power and data necessary to store if a lot of people start using your service. And I'm not sure how you handle multiple requests for the same feed, or look to see if people stop subscribing to a certain feed.

Why not something more like feedstomper.com/?feed=http://www.reddit.com/.rss or something? But if you switch to that, will everyone who is already subscribed to 43.xml and 95.xml find that their feeds get broken?

Also, it means that I can just browse around and take a look at 32.xml or 15.xml and check out what everyone else is reading, which might be problematic if people are submitting personal feeds, from say, "friend's shared items" from google reader.

And what about a "when do you want this feed updated" option? Ideally I want it to update just before I (arbitrarily) decide to access it, so the feed is as current as possible despite having only updated once that day.

It's possible that I'm being pre-emptive and you have already thought of these things. You did specifically ask for problems, rather than feature requests.

But I like the service; the few alternatives I know of are not nearly as elegant.

[streblo]

voted up for building something i'll use and for having an awesome job