It can show the entire family tree for a person in a GEDCOM file (all of their relatives and in-laws) without any crossing lines and with lots of control over the styling.

I couldn't find any other software that does this, except maybe Gramps. Hopefully people will find it useful.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268686

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Eventually I decided I should have some tests. This is a bit ironic since I am a professional software tester. I realized at that point adding features by adding tests was a powerful approach. The AI writes the test and runs the test. When it fails it updates the code to fix the failed test.

Sadly, some new features caused regression issues because my test suite was not very complete and because the AI changed the novel parts I so carefully crafted. Now I'm going back to create tests for everything that was implemented before the test suite was created. We'll see how it goes.

My app is here for the curious: https://github.com/erikshelley/complete-family-tree-viewer/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47540193

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Luckily this change shouldn't impact me too significantly since my primary niche will be in the 7% bracket and I was making 7-8% previously.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.in/

$20k from a website I built a couple years ago (searchable product catalog with Amazon affiliate links).

Users of my site click on an affiliate link about 40% of the time and those that do make a purchase about 2.5% of the time with an average commission of $5. This means I make about $0.05 per visitor so I would need ads with a CPC less than that. In my niche this does not seem remotely possible.

Luckily I'm getting over 1,200 visitors per day without paying for them.

The approach is to find a type of product where Amazon has thousands of listing but the specifications are not very accurate and the filtering criteria are limited, and where there are highly active forums with people talking about and asking about these products. Then you build a proper searchable catalog for the products. Include lots of search criteria, sorting criteria, side-by-side comparison, recommended accessories, anything that would be useful for people looking to buy them.

Once my catalog contained over 1,000 models I started replying to posts on forums with a link to my site that provided what they were looking for. People loved the site and it wasn't long before they were posting links to it to answer each others questions. That's all it took to start ranking on Google which is now responsible for 3/4 of my traffic.

Initially this is not passive income. The first few months are a lot of work for very little money. Eventually the balances shifts to the point where additional work is only needed if you want to keep growing. Amazon's product advertising API allows you to get current prices, availability and popularity (sales ranking) to keep everything fresh.