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My side project: an open-sourced comedy community

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21–30 of 34 posts

Re: My side project: an open-sourced comedy community

#21
Looks interesting. I had a few good laughs.

I may have missed something, but it seems that some articles i'm able to chomp, while others im not. Is this intended, or a bug? I thought one was hilarious, when to chomp it, and it said "Chomped!" I hadn't chomped it. So I was a bit confused. Bug maybe?

Re: My side project: an open-sourced comedy community

#22
post #20
post #19

Awesome, finally an intelligent social site where being funny won't draw allusions to digg and reddit:D Anyways, I'm in. May be just the creative outlet I need.

I wrote a fairly lengthy article and published it, only to find I'd been logged out:(

Hmmm, thanks for the head's up, I smell a bug. I'll double check my session flow after registration tonight.

Re: My side project: an open-sourced comedy community

#23
post #21

Looks interesting. I had a few good laughs. I may have missed something, but it seems that some articles i'm able to chomp, while others im not. Is this intended, or a bug? I thought one was hilarious, when to chomp it, and it said "Chomped!" I hadn't chomped it. So I was a bit confused. Bug maybe?

Yeah I noticed the non-member chomping seemed a bit weird, I'm going to double check this tonight, thanks for the feedback. Basically, it should allow one vote on each story for each unique IP, whether you're logged in or not. I hope it's not allowing only one vote total for each non-logged in IP.

Maybe I should add a 'beta' tag at the top -- but I'm assuming my target audience wouldn't even know what that was ;)...

Re: My side project: an open-sourced comedy community

#24
Hey, great idea. As a former comedy writer I think it's really cool you decided to focus on written content instead of the usual YouTube stuff; comedy articles are an underappreciated form these days.

I agree with those who've said the design needs some work. I can see what you were going for, but I'm not sure you got there -- film noir is a tough look to pull off on the web. The monospaced font does feel like it's from another era, but to me it feels more like the early 90s than a 40s broadsheet. Personally I'd go with a regular serif font like Georgia, with a healthy amount of linespacing. For consistency's sake, I'd also keep the number of fonts you use to an absolute minimum -- the use of Tahoma on the right sidebar makes the "Cast" and "Popular Articles" sections look sort of like RSS widgets that don't fit in with the rest of the content. All that aside I do like the simplicity of the layout.

Yeah, I love the idea and I hope it takes off. Best of luck.

Re: My side project: an open-sourced comedy community

#26
post #24

Hey, great idea. As a former comedy writer I think it's really cool you decided to focus on written content instead of the usual YouTube stuff; comedy articles are an underappreciated form these days. I agree with those who've said the design needs some work. I can see what you were going for, but I'm not sure you got there -- film noir is a tough look to pull off on the web. The monospaced font does feel like it's f…

The comedy article is hard to pull off because it's so rare an unexpected. There's not much precedent so it seems like an unusual art form. I think it would be easier to write stand-up, sit-coms, or YouTubeish videos.

Re: My side project: an open-sourced comedy community

#27
post #24

Hey, great idea. As a former comedy writer I think it's really cool you decided to focus on written content instead of the usual YouTube stuff; comedy articles are an underappreciated form these days. I agree with those who've said the design needs some work. I can see what you were going for, but I'm not sure you got there -- film noir is a tough look to pull off on the web. The monospaced font does feel like it's f…

The comedy article is hard to pull off because it's so rare an unexpected. There's not much precedent so it seems like an unusual art form. I think it would be easier to write stand-up, sit-coms, or YouTubeish videos.

Yeah, the only really good era for written comedy was the 70s, when the National Lampoon had millions of readers. These days when comedy articles appear in the mainstream they're almost always in the fake news format, which is pretty rigid. Even the more creative outlets like McSweeney's have a fairly narrow style.

There are a bunch of decent college humor publications out there, though, and some of them have wide readership at their campuses. There might be a large enough base of people familiar with the form for it to get some mainstream traction again, if it's given the chance.

Re: My side project: an open-sourced comedy community

#28
post #3

I think that's a really neat idea. I'd definitely visit. However, the design needs improvement. Please stop using that font. Add some color to it. Segment the site a bit more, it seems a little jumbled to me. Perhaps encapsulate each section of the site into it's own box, like the comedy pieces and 'the cast,' etc. I had some difficulty reading the links under your header image. Give your headings/subheadings/piece h…

I like your font and color. It has a very amateur, Drudge Report-esque feel to it. It fits your open-mike style comedy site.

Re: My side project: an open-sourced comedy community

#29
post #21

Looks interesting. I had a few good laughs. I may have missed something, but it seems that some articles i'm able to chomp, while others im not. Is this intended, or a bug? I thought one was hilarious, when to chomp it, and it said "Chomped!" I hadn't chomped it. So I was a bit confused. Bug maybe?

It was a bug. Thanks again for the head's up. You should now be able to vote for anything once even when you're not registered.

Re: My side project: an open-sourced comedy community

#30

Yeah, that's awesome. Very impressed. I agree about the design, it's just too colorless. And this is coming from someone who does a lot of design for a lot of different things and always has people tell him he uses too much black and white.

Thanks Matt, I'm glad you dig the concept. The simple comedy article is a lost art imo. A lot of sites buried themselves into one format or another, which is why I like the concept of leaving the format entirely up to the writer. In that regard, entertainment is generic. As long as people like it, it'll get the support.

My original idea was to have everything black/white, and then have like insanely weird mouseovers on things, but it ended up looking like an 80's ode to graffiti gone horribly wrong. Perhaps I went a little too crazy on the simplicity front.

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