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Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

skillswap.in

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Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#13

Post by chrismorgan »

Something I would really like to see here is use of gender-specific pronoun "he" or "she" instead of "they". Yes, the language has changed so that "they" is acceptable as gender-neutral singular, but it's still regularly jarring, and when the information is or can conveniently be there (you can very easily collect it—male, female or unspecified) it makes it much more pleasant to read.

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#15

Post by jackfranklin »

chrismorgan wrote: post #13

Something I would really like to see here is use of gender-specific pronoun "he" or "she" instead of "they". Yes, the language has changed so that "they" is acceptable as gender-neutral singular, but it's still regularly jarring, and when the information is or can conveniently be there (you can very easily collect it—male, female or unspecified) it makes it much more pleasant to read.

Do you know how we would go about doing it? (That's not a snarky Q - I genuinely don't know!). I too would love to but I'm unsure as to how to reliably do it - and in the mean time gender-neutral was a safer bet.

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#16

Post by jackfranklin »

DjangoReinhardt wrote: post #14

Good one, beautifully done. Just signed up. :) Request: Provide an option to delete swaps. Once I've found someone willing to exchange help, maybe I wouldn't want to continue advertising the swap? Just a thought... :-)

Thanks - that one is absolutely on our list.

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#17

Post by DjangoReinhardt »

jackfranklin wrote: post #16
DjangoReinhardt wrote: post #14

Good one, beautifully done. Just signed up. :) Request: Provide an option to delete swaps. Once I've found someone willing to exchange help, maybe I wouldn't want to continue advertising the swap? Just a thought... :-)

Thanks - that one is absolutely on our list.

In fact, you don't even have to allow delete - you can just let the users 'hide' them. That way, if I want to offer the same swap, I can just 'unhide' it. :-)

Out of curiosity, what's the stack? I read Heroku & MongoDB. I'm guessing it is an Ember.js app?

EDIT: unhide not unidentified. Damn you auto correct!

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#18

Post by chrismorgan »

jackfranklin wrote: post #15
chrismorgan wrote: post #13

Something I would really like to see here is use of gender-specific pronoun "he" or "she" instead of "they". Yes, the language has changed so that "they" is acceptable as gender-neutral singular, but it's still regularly jarring, and when the information is or can conveniently be there (you can very easily collect it—male, female or unspecified) it makes it much more pleasant to read.

Do you know how we would go about doing it? (That's not a snarky Q - I genuinely don't know!). I too would love to but I'm unsure as to how to reliably do it - and in the mean time gender-neutral was a safer bet.

You could tie it in with letting the user specify the name to display; changing away from using Twitter handles is probably not a bad thing anyway. Thus you could have as part of the sign-up process:

    1. Call me _________
    2. Refer to me as 
       ( ) male ("he")
       ( ) female ("she")
       (x) gender-neutral or plural ("they")
       ( ) actually, we're a group ("they")
For e.g. Twitter sign-up, you'd auto-fill the first with their username and the second with gender-neutral.

That does sound rather awkward and could hopefully be improved upon. (I added the final option as it occurred to me businesses could use this.)

Re: Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

#20

Post by jackfranklin »

DjangoReinhardt wrote: post #17
jackfranklin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks - that one is absolutely on our list.

In fact, you don't even have to allow delete - you can just let the users 'hide' them. That way, if I want to offer the same swap, I can just 'unhide' it. :-) Out of curiosity, what's the stack? I read Heroku & MongoDB. I'm guessing it is an Ember.js app? EDIT: unhide not unidentified. Damn you auto correct!

The entire source code is on my GitHub account: https://github.com/jackfranklin/skillswap

It uses the free Heroku instance with the free MongoHQ addon. That way if the site failed completely I wouldn't be out of pocket! If it keeps being used we'll either stump up some cash for Heroku or look at other hosting options. For now the free Heroku is fine, and the free MongoHQ addon still has enough space, particularly as we're storing so little.

There's no Ember or any similar framework, just a bit of jQuery that does the search filtering (which I want to improve - the entire site is a result of a 3-4 hour hack yesterday, plenty can be improved upon).

It's a small Ruby app that uses Sinatra, with Mongoid my gem of choice for talking to MongoDB. Uses the omniauth gem to authenticate with Twitter, and that's about it. Dead simple :)

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