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Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives

knifegeek.io

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Re: Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives

#41

Post by ICodeSometimes »

qup wrote: post #26
quaxar wrote: post #17

I'm a knife collector, so this site seems cool. One thing that can be improved is how the knives are displayed. The white aliased border around the thumbnails looks really really bad, and really turns me off from staying on the site. One major reason why people like knives is that they look beautiful. The image thumbnail does the complete opposite. Please use 24bit PNG with proper alpha, on a lighter background, so b…

+1 The hover effect, too. Nice experiment to learn something, now it's time to burn it with fire.

This made me laugh quite a bit, took over an hour to do that hover thing and i felt fancy for it too. I just removed it as i agree it looks a little shoddy

Re: Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives

#42

Post by ICodeSometimes »

fbdab103 wrote: post #37

How did you build the database? Were you able to piggy back off of existing efforts or did you go vendor to vendor, scraping your way? Journey of a thousand miles and all that, but building the inventory feels like the most vital, yet boring part of the entire endeavor.

Scraped my way through 15 sites so far. It's wildly boring stuff but someones got to do it

There are some general sellers (bladeHQ, knifecenter, mountain) where you can scrape thousands of brands at once which is helpful too.

Re: Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives

#43

Post by ICodeSometimes »

nabilhat wrote: post #19

A small friction point is that middle click, ctrl-click, and right-click / open in new tab are all unavailable to access details for a knife. If I wanted to compare a few results, I'd prefer to open details in new tabs. Sometimes that's a nice way to put a pin in one thing and compare it to another thing that comes up in a different search. A select-to-compare option that opens a table (optionally in a new tab!) can…

> A small friction point is that middle click, ctrl-click, and right-click / open in new tab are all unavailable to access details for a knife.

just fixed it as soon as i got home. Should be good to go!

--- Select-to-compare functionality does sound super interesting though and could be useful, added it to my backlog :D

Re: Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives

#44

Post by ICodeSometimes »

conductr wrote: post #39
ICodeSometimes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Actually thats a great idea and should be doable! I already do some analysis on the images. Will take a stab at it in the next few days and post back here.

> Will take a stab at it Well done, sir

Ah, yes, totally planned pun :D

Re: Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives

#45

Post by ICodeSometimes »

dtgriscom wrote: post #25
nabilhat wrote: post #19

A small friction point is that middle click, ctrl-click, and right-click / open in new tab are all unavailable to access details for a knife. If I wanted to compare a few results, I'd prefer to open details in new tabs. Sometimes that's a nice way to put a pin in one thing and compare it to another thing that comes up in a different search. A select-to-compare option that opens a table (optionally in a new tab!) can…

Oh, yeah. Sites which disable the much-loved "command-click" are a PIA. Let people browse as they will; forcing them along your expected paths is inconsiderate and off-putting.

Used nextjs so this was Link component weirdness in action. swapped it out now and good to go!

Re: Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives

#46

Post by ICodeSometimes »

miguel-muniz wrote: post #33

> Back then i noticed something, it was quite tedious to easily sift and search through knives based on length, steel, brand, and what not to find the knife for me A lot of hobbies have this same problem. Dunno why there isn't a self-host solution. Something like https://pcpartpicker.com/ but flexible to any type of product/community

I think the main problem here is the lack of datasets! the most annoying part of this whole project is writing the scraper

Re: Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives

#48

Post by ICodeSometimes »

hnbear wrote: post #38

I’m not much of a knife guy but have a couple and know what I’m looking for feature wise, less so on specific steel types. But, proper drop downs would help a lot, I can’t always remember all the terms. And, once I’ve found a knife, showing one’s with similar features would be really cool.

> But, proper drop downs would help a lot, I can’t always remember all the terms.

Just shipped an update to list all values! That's a good point.

> And, once I’ve found a knife, showing one’s with similar features would be really cool.

Comparisons sounds totally useful, added it to my backlog. Thank you!

Re: Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives

#49

Post by ICodeSometimes »

andrewmunsell wrote: post #27

How did you approach the data population? The images of the knives are all consistently positioned, which is impressive, and there seems to be a decent amount of structured data for the number of entries you have

Scraped 15 websites, got a good pipeline that ingests and cleans the data once the scraping is done.

images get positioned according to simple logic (find top, find bottom, rotate, etc...)

data is cleaned and units are stripped accordingly (5 inches can be 5in 5 in 5inch 5inches etc...)

so far it's really trivial code so alot of measurements are getting dropped, need to go back in and fix it up and re-scrape/populate the data soon.

Re: Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives

#50

Post by ICodeSometimes »

ICodeSometimes wrote: post #49
andrewmunsell wrote: post #27

How did you approach the data population? The images of the knives are all consistently positioned, which is impressive, and there seems to be a decent amount of structured data for the number of entries you have

Scraped 15 websites, got a good pipeline that ingests and cleans the data once the scraping is done. images get positioned according to simple logic (find top, find bottom, rotate, etc...) data is cleaned and units are stripped accordingly (5 inches can be 5in 5 in 5inch 5inches etc...) so far it's really trivial code so alot of measurements are getting dropped, need to go back in and fix it up and re-scrape/populate…

also using fp-ts to try out functional programming, it's really perfect for this type of thing, pipe reads really nicely here.
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