Well, last night was Day 1 of my "14 Day Hacker News App". I'm going to post what I got done the previous day and what I am planning on doing that day/night. Last night (aka Day 1) I got the ball rolling on Rankoro.us:

Reserve a domain name. Well, in this case two domain names. I Reserved Rankoro.us and Rankorous.com through GoDaddy.com. I'm leaning towards Rankoro.us but I like to reserve the equivalent .com whenever I'm using a non-.com domain.

Set up social network accounts. I set up a Facebook Application and Twitter account incase I need them down the line.

"Finalized" wireframes. Ok, so MS Paint isn't really the Wireframe method of choice but it's quick. I made a few rough sketches and sent them off to a buddy of mine who owes me some design work.

Transfer DNS Nameservers/set up DNS. I hate GoDaddy.com for everything except the cost of registering. I've been trying out dnsimple.com (started by a Hacker News reader) and so far it's making life a little simpler. I pointed the nameservers at my dnsimple account and set up a few basic DNS records for Rankoro.us and Rankorous.com.

Set up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster accounts. Not ready to use these yet but I set up and verified both using the DNS record option so they will be ready to go when needed.

Added Rankoro.us and Rankorous.com as aliases for my Google Apps account. Easiest way to get mail set up for a new domain--just make it an alias of a Google Apps account (I have the $50/yr premier version, well worth it) and set up some MX records (back to dnsimple.com) and it was done..

Create an account with ConstantContact.com to hold my mailing list. I don't plan on sending any emails for (exactly) 2 weeks but I'll use the account to create my pre-launch mailing list. Even after your trial period expires, you can still add to your mailing list. Great for those projects that never seem to launch.

That's all. Tonight I'll be setting up hosting using my Rackspace Cloud servers, setting up my initial project (it's going to be php/mysql), and get a landing page set up to start collecting some email addresses for my prelaunch.