Ask HN: Review my news site

#1

Post by drewtown » Fri, Aug 13, 2010, 12:25 PM UTC

I decided that the other popular link dump style news sites were missing a few items that I felt were important. So I decided to make one myself as a hobby project.

Obviously there are a few things wrong with it still but as the saying goes around here, release early, release often I wanted to get some outside feedback as to what people felt were important feature they that I was missing. So please leave and feedback or criticism and I'll happily take it into consideration.

www.URLTide.com

Re: Ask HN: Review my news site

#2

Post by clistctrl » Fri, Aug 13, 2010, 12:32 PM UTC

Its actually a pretty sweet website.

Re: Ask HN: Review my news site

#3

Post by drewtown » Fri, Aug 13, 2010, 12:39 PM UTC

clistctrl wrote: post #2

Its actually a pretty sweet website.

Thank you, appreciate it!

Re: Ask HN: Review my news site

#4

Post by jjantzen » Fri, Aug 13, 2010, 2:05 PM UTC

Decent approach--like the segmented site integration.

Re: Ask HN: Review my news site

#5

Post by wolfrom » Fri, Aug 13, 2010, 2:35 PM UTC

It seems like a good approach. The only thing that throws me off is the two columns with tabs; which tabs go where seems arbitrary to me (but maybe it's not and I just don't know that). I wonder if it would work to split it between the types of channels, with one column for social/submitted/aggregated news (Digg, Slashdot, HN) and another for the primary sources.

Re: Ask HN: Review my news site

#6

Post by drewtown » Fri, Aug 13, 2010, 2:40 PM UTC

wolfrom wrote: post #5

It seems like a good approach. The only thing that throws me off is the two columns with tabs; which tabs go where seems arbitrary to me (but maybe it's not and I just don't know that). I wonder if it would work to split it between the types of channels, with one column for social/submitted/aggregated news (Digg, Slashdot, HN) and another for the primary sources.

What I tried to do was split by section, then within each section split by source type. Some work better than others but for example the tech section is split mostly by social media, primary sources, e-zines (sort of), and major blogs.

Re: Ask HN: Review my news site

#7

Post by wolfrom » Fri, Aug 13, 2010, 2:56 PM UTC

drewtown wrote: post #6

wolfrom wrote: post #5

It seems like a good approach. The only thing that throws me off is the two columns with tabs; which tabs go where seems arbitrary to me (but maybe it's not and I just don't know that). I wonder if it would work to split it between the types of channels, with one column for social/submitted/aggregated news (Digg, Slashdot, HN) and another for the primary sources.

What I tried to do was split by section, then within each section split by source type. Some work better than others but for example the tech section is split mostly by social media, primary sources, e-zines (sort of), and major blogs.

The division isn't intuitive to me at this point, but maybe I rely too much on actual labels/headers. I think it's little things that throw me off, like Digg being separate from its counterparts on the Tech page.

Re: Ask HN: Review my news site

#8

Post by drewtown » Fri, Aug 13, 2010, 3:08 PM UTC

wolfrom wrote: post #7

drewtown wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I tried to do was split by section, then within each section split by source type. Some work better than others but for example the tech section is split mostly by social media, primary sources, e-zines (sort of), and major blogs.

The division isn't intuitive to me at this point, but maybe I rely too much on actual labels/headers. I think it's little things that throw me off, like Digg being separate from its counterparts on the Tech page.

Admittedly, the organization is quite arbitrary. I wanted to have what I thought would be the most popular tabs up on page load, to reduce the number of AJAX requests and secondly because that's mostly what people want to read. For the tech page I thought more people would be interested in reading Digg, rather than PC World or CNET so I moved Digg to occupy a first position in a different box.