I'm curious what framework you use to generate the pdfs?
TeX?
yep, it's pdfTeX, I just verified it in the document properties. I'm glad you used it :)
Ask HN: Please review my website
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: Ask HN: Please review my website
#22first of all the idea is great, and when my son is older I will definitely use this. What would be really nice is some sort of guidance system by age. For instance, which worksheets are appropriate for which age, maybe as a wide range. and the parameters within the worksheets could use a recommendation as well. This is because as a first time parent it is hard to tell as i've already gotten the feeling that presenting toys of wrong difficulty sometimes really results in reduced intended effect.
Re: Ask HN: Please review my website
#23first of all the idea is great, and when my son is older I will definitely use this. What would be really nice is some sort of guidance system by age. For instance, which worksheets are appropriate for which age, maybe as a wide range. and the parameters within the worksheets could use a recommendation as well. This is because as a first time parent it is hard to tell as i've already gotten the feeling that presentin…
We are plan to add age and grade based menu soon. Thank you.
Re: Ask HN: Please review my website
#24Re: Ask HN: Please review my website
#25Great website! I actually will probably take advantage of this. As far as design goes, the site looks pretty good. It's not super flashy, but I think that's generally a good thing. A few minor nitpicks. 1) I think you should put a few images on the homepage, and possibly elsewhere. Text is nice, but I find I value the visual description as well. A picture's worth a thousand words and whatnot. 2) This is very minor, b…
This page is almost an exemplar for the story I was reading earlier about "coders can't market". Your site looks useful and like bingo-card generator could earn you a nice living - I'd check out his marketing and design (colourful and bright not drab brown, teachers need joy!).
Also you should check out your competition, decide what your unique selling points are and market your advantages.
Your strapline sucks, IMO, something more like "the super-easy, super-fast, instant online maths* worksheet generator; because practice makes perfect".
I'd also look at the Home-Ed market and spam some of their forums ... in a nice way.
* It's maths dammit, not math.
Re: Ask HN: Please review my website
#26Very quick feedback: it was immediately obvious to me what the site did, and it only took a couple of clicks to make it do something useful. This is exactly the way that things should be. The site solves a clear problem and it does it well. Good stuff. I didn't see any monetization in my (admittedly brief) visit. Do you have any plans to make money from the site?
Note makeworksheets ( http://makeworksheets.com/samples/math/index.html ) seem like stiff competition and there yearly charge is $30, quite cheap for a teacher given the utility.
Re: Ask HN: Please review my website
#27The register and login links shouldn't be visible on every page. Instead ask users to login when they actually need to log in (e.g. creating sheets). Contact us shouldn't be a big tab, instead something in the footer. Your "Follow Us" "On Twitter" part should be all one line, and perhaps be reworded to "You should follow us on twitter here (see http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html ) The 1px bo…
You should also use a fixed page width IMO, something like http://www.blueprintcss.org/ will help keep a text alignment grid and sort out your colums too, see the CSS file generator at http://kematzy.com/blueprint-generator/ .
I disagree on the "popular worksheets" idea. I think most will want a specific form of worksheet rather than the most popular, an option to sort by popularity would be good. You might want to look at table sorting in JQuery (eg http://tablesorter.com/docs/#Demo ).
Twitter? Use the twitter bird! A picture is worth 1E3 lexical tokens.
Re: Ask HN: Please review my website
#28first of all the idea is great, and when my son is older I will definitely use this. What would be really nice is some sort of guidance system by age. For instance, which worksheets are appropriate for which age, maybe as a wide range. and the parameters within the worksheets could use a recommendation as well. This is because as a first time parent it is hard to tell as i've already gotten the feeling that presentin…
We are plan to add age and grade based menu soon. Thank you.
Don't forget to mention which country/regions grading system you're using.
Re: Ask HN: Please review my website
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think forcing a PDF download in order to have any idea what you're getting is a mistake. Some sort of HTML preview would be really nice. Second, and it would be helpful to view some demos on the front page. I realised I was going to download some sheets, but what did they look like? Shouldn't be too hard to screenshot a few as demos.
The reason why don't use HTML is because HTML cannot show complicate equations and layout without a lot of graphics. We will consider screencast.
You could cache the pdf files as they're generated and produce a cropped and reduced size (and watermarked!) PNG file from the images using ImageMagick (or similar) on your server. Dump those PNG to a folder occassionally (eg cron job) and use a "coverflow" style generator (eg http://www.imageflow.nl/ ) to add some panache to the page and show what type of worksheets people are using. If you do I'll bet you get more clicks via the coverflow links than any other route.
Edit: looking again I'd really make an effort to add both a link and a graphical watermark to the free printouts. One upgrade you can offer is to remove the watermark. Another is to add the school name and logo in place of your own. The name/logo (no logo yet?) is _free_ marketing ... headteacher see the worksheet, tells superintendent, informs all teachers in the region ..., etc..