For those who don’t know, HermitClock is my latest side project. It’s a website which shows the live, local times for all of the active Hermitcraft members. Hermitcraft is a Minecraft, multiplayer survival server on which only a select group of players (often called Hermits) can play. All of the active Hermits are content creators, regularly uploading to YouTube or streaming on Twitch.
In this post, I’m going to talk about:
- The launch of HermitClock:
- What happened,
- How it gained momentum and popularity.
- My response to the launch:
- Bug fixes,
- Community engagement.
- The future of HermitClock:
- Plans for future development,
- How you can be involved.
The Launch of HermitClock
HermitClock was officially available to the public on 10th May 2024. At this time, the core functionality was done, I couldn’t identify any bugs in the platform, and it was hosted on its domain with a modest configuration.
As I had created the website not as a product to sell, but instead as a tool for myself, I had low expectations of its potential. Regardless, I knew it was likely that other members of the Hermitcraft community might find it useful. To that end, I decided to share it on the Hermitcraft subreddit.
Before sharing it, to not violate the subreddit’s rule against self-promotion, I first shared it with the moderators. After around a week, they gave me the go-ahead to post it. In case you’re curious, here’s the post I made.
Much to my delight, it received a lot of positive praise and, admittedly, I was quite surprised. The responses in the thread were either compliments, suggestions, or helpful insights into inaccuracies in the data shown on the website. For the 2 days following the creation of that post, according to Google Analytics, the website saw an average of around 10 users over any 30 minutes.
I was satisfied with the performance of the website. At this stage, I was expecting the traffic to slow to a trickle. That is until one of the Hermits themselves mentioned the website. TangoTek, known for his incredible skills using an in-game circuitry resource called ‘Red Stone’, was wrapping up his stream when he started thinking out loud about what the local time for another Hermit was. He then asked his stream if they’d “seen the new HermitClock website?“, and proceeded to share the link with his audience. Within seconds of that link being shared, hundreds of users immediately flooded the website, crashing it almost instantaneously
Since then, the website’s performed very well! It’s been shared across Twitter and Facebook and is receiving a healthy amount of direct visitors. And that takes us to today, almost 2 weeks after the original launch date.
My Response to the Launch
I’ve had to suspend my disbelief. As a passionate web developer, I’ve built dozens of websites, many of which I built wanting them to become successful. So to have my first successful launch be a product that wasn’t intended to be a ‘product’, is crazy. It has made me reflect on what a ‘good idea’ actually is. One issue with creating products is that it’s hard to find something that fulfils a need. Often it seems like in creating a product, or website, you’re trying to convince people it’s something that they want or need, even if that’s not entirely true. As I made HermitClock for myself, putting myself in the shoes of a user, and fully intending to use it personally, it ended up satisfying a genuine need. This has been a valuable lesson for me. Admittedly, I was conscious of this concept before, but this marks the moment I truly learned to respect that.
Bug Fixes
Moving on to the action I took over the course of the launch period, it was a bit of frantic feature implementations and fixes. On the Reddit post, dozens of people left pieces of feedback such as Hermits being in the wrong time zones, bugs in the clock’s behaviour, the desire to switch between 12 and 24-hour formats, and UX issues with the time zones not being in any specific order. Within 48 hours of making the post, I had made the following changes (taken directly from my edits on the Reddit post):
- Fixed the issue with 12 PM showing as 12 AM.
- All times now use the 12-hour format by default.
- Fixed some typos.
- Changes to Hermit info:
- Moved Etho to Canada/Mountain time.
- Moved Scar to US/Pacific time.
- Changed Stress’ Instagram from her personal account to her Minecraft account.
- Sort timezones by their times.
- Added option to switch between 12/24 hour formats.
- Added a button to refresh the background image without a page refresh.
As you can imagine, these tweaks took a lot of work. Outside of what I reported on the Reddit post, I also carried out work on adding more background images, fixing mobile responsive issues, improving the deployment infrastructure of the website to handle more traffic, and more.
Community Engagement
With the website being so well received, I wanted to make sure that I was doing everything I could to engage with the community. I made sure to respond to as many of the comments as I could on Reddit, and even on Twitter. I didn’t have a Twitter account before all of this, so I made one just to engage with the people who were kind enough to share my work. There was even a bug in the front end of the website that I only became aware of due to a screenshot on Twitter! I added the links for my Twitter and Reddit accounts on the footer of the website, with the idea being that it’s an easy way for people to reach out to me, should they want to.
I’ve received contact form messages via my personal website, as I linked this form in the footer of HermitClock. I’ve had messages with further feedback, suggestions, and even a message from a member of the Hermitcraft Server, asking me to amend their information on the website. I’ve made a point of responding to all of the messages I’ve received on this channel as well.
The Future of HermitClock
I’m excited to say that, despite my initial intentions, I’m currently in the process of fully realising the plans for HermitClock. While I’m not in a position to share timeframes or a concrete road map just yet, I can share the following features which, in no particular order, will be coming to HermitClock over the next few weeks/months:
- Bespoke logo and brand identity.
- Improved header and footer designs.
- Landing pages for each Hermit.
- Extra information per Hermit:
- Current live status for their stream.
- Links for their most recent uploads.
- Time since their last upload.
- Dynamic sorting and searching for the full Hermit list.
I’m excited for the future of this project, and I’m excited to have had the chance to make something that people like. I hope that with some careful planning and well-executed features, HermitClock will become a cornerstone tool within the Hermitcraft community.
If you’d like to be involved in this project, please reach out to me. You can do this via the comments, my contact form, or any of the social media platforms I have available. If you have ideas for features you’d like to see, suggestions that can help better Hermitclock, or even skills of your own you’d like to contribute towards the project with, I’d be excited to hear from you.
Thank you for taking the time to read this development update for HermitClock. Thank you to everyone who has tried it out so far. And the biggest thank you to everyone who has shared it. There will be more updates to come.
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