Ask HN: Could I have your thoughts on my Cheat Sheet Generator and Resource?

#1

Post by DaveChild » Tue, Nov 01, 2011, 10:27 AM UTC

One of my side projects has actually made it to the internet. Woohoo! My ability to scupper my own projects by overthinking them apparently does know some bounds. Anyway, I'd love to hear what HN thinks of the idea, execution, etc.

http://www.cheatography.com/

It's a simple cheat sheet builder and resource - you assemble a cheat sheet with lots of useful info, and the site generates a PDF and shares it with everyone.

At the moment it's all ad-supported, and I'm considering adding adverts to the PDFs as well. I'm trying to come up with better revenue ideas than the current (AdSense) advertising.

Things I'm already working on ... I'm not particularly happy with how the cheat sheets are exposed - if you visit a cheat sheet page, there's no above-the-fold route to other cheat sheets. The homepage links to new cheat sheets but not in a particularly enticing way. And I'm going to add a "cheat screen" - a live, full-page, JS-controlled cheat sheet you can bookmark.

Re: Ask HN: Could I have your thoughts on my Cheat Sheet Generator and Resource?

#2

Post by DaveChild » Tue, Nov 01, 2011, 10:42 AM UTC

Also, here's a link: http://www.cheatography.com/

Re: Ask HN: Could I have your thoughts on my Cheat Sheet Generator and Resource?

#3

Post by ishi » Tue, Nov 01, 2011, 11:31 AM UTC

Nice idea, I like it. It kinda "democratizes" the cheat-sheet generation industry (as much as such an industry exists).

One thing that you should fix is the PDF download. When downloading a cheatsheet the filename looks like someGibberish.pdf.part and Windows doesn't know what to do with it. Should be: HumanReadableCheatsheetTitle.pdf instead.

Re: Ask HN: Could I have your thoughts on my Cheat Sheet Generator and Resource?

#4

Post by DaveChild » Tue, Nov 01, 2011, 1:30 PM UTC

ishi wrote: post #3

Nice idea, I like it. It kinda "democratizes" the cheat-sheet generation industry (as much as such an industry exists). One thing that you should fix is the PDF download. When downloading a cheatsheet the filename looks like someGibberish.pdf.part and Windows doesn't know what to do with it. Should be: HumanReadableCheatsheetTitle.pdf instead.

Hi ishi. Glad to hear you like the idea :)

Thanks for letting me know about the filename issue. I'd not spotted that. I've changed the filename to something more useful!

Re: Ask HN: Could I have your thoughts on my Cheat Sheet Generator and Resource?

#5

Post by bennywild » Tue, Nov 01, 2011, 4:34 PM UTC

This is wonderful. I'm totally gonna use it and contribute to it on a long flight tomorrow.

You can always tell a good idea when it gets your gears turning. With the sort of database that you'll be building, you could experiment with different visualization strategies and hyperlinking between cheat sheets!

A simpler task for version 1.0.1: Make sure that formatting is cleaner on the generated PDFs. For example, on this cheat sheet there is one hanging row on an otherwise empty pp2

http://www.cheatography.com/davechild/cheat-sheets/javascrip...

Re: Ask HN: Could I have your thoughts on my Cheat Sheet Generator and Resource?

#6

Post by DaveChild » Wed, Nov 02, 2011, 8:54 AM UTC

bennywild wrote: post #5

This is wonderful. I'm totally gonna use it and contribute to it on a long flight tomorrow. You can always tell a good idea when it gets your gears turning. With the sort of database that you'll be building, you could experiment with different visualization strategies and hyperlinking between cheat sheets! A simpler task for version 1.0.1: Make sure that formatting is cleaner on the generated PDFs. For example, on th…

Glad you like it! Since launching it I've become almost obsessed with ideas for cheat sheets, and one thing I want to add in is a "cheat sheet zeitgeist" - a page which lists requests, ordered by their recent popularity.

I'm working on a few formatting issues at the moment. Unfortunately, the pdf generator I'm using doesn't have much of a concept of pagination, so I'm trying to work that part out in PHP, generate multiple PDFs, then glue them together. It's not working too well so far :)

Re: Ask HN: Could I have your thoughts on my Cheat Sheet Generator and Resource?

#7

Post by mapster » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 10:45 PM UTC

Great site and app. I made a cheatsheet builder for videos (vidinotes) - thereby taking video stills, adding notes, and exporting as PDF. But I had too many projects so I sold it.