Hacker Slide - http://hackerslide.com/ - is an experimental Hacker News client that stores snapshots of the front page items over time and allows you to scroll through them. I lifted the concept (though no code) from a Reddit equivalent at http://redditsnapshot.sweyla.com/

As of writing, the crawler on the main site has only been running for a day so there's not much data yet. Over time, I plan to extend the interface to deal with scrolling through days/weeks/months/etc. For now, it's just very simple.

There's very little code to pull this off but whatever there is and that isn't already licensed is BSD licensed so you can do almost whatever you want. At first glance, it seems like the Sinatra app is hardly doing anything and in theory it could be rewritten to use a static HTML page but... eh.

Technologies used:

* Ruby
* Sinatra - http://sinatrarb.com/
* jQuery and jQuery UI
* Slider control - http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/update_jquery_ui_slider_from_a_select_element_now_with_aria_support/
* ruby-hackernews - http://github.com/bolthar/ruby-hackernews

If you want to try it locally, run crawl.rb once and then run the Sinatra app using Shotgun or rackup.

Peter Cooper
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=petercooper
http://twitter.com/peterc
http://peterc.org/