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Today I launched my solo project, Listry. Feedback/suggestions appreciated

listry.com

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Re: Today I launched my solo project, Listry. Feedback/suggestions appreciated

#13

Post by stingraycharles »

Spines11 wrote: post #6
stingraycharles wrote: post #3

Congratulations with your launch! It looks like you've got a nice hybrid between HN/Reddit-style voting and Stackoverflow-topics, - personally haven't seen such a site before. It'll be interesting to see whether you'll succeed building a community around it. Any plan-of-attacks on gaining traction?

Thanks! Yea, building the community will be the tough part. I was planning on writing high quality articles on Listry and then hopefully some of the people that read the article would want to add their own input to the article and that's how they would get started contributing. Any suggestions?

I'm not sure, - that could be a way, but only if you actually enjoy writing those articles.

Just thinking out loud, your time could also be spend editorially adding more and more subjects and quality lists. The whole problem with such a site is that you need to maintain some level of quality, which is best maintained by attracting people that care about that quality. If you have a lot of quality lists with quality subjects, the next thing you need to ensure is that Google (and other search engines) pick up on that.

If I search for "emacs color themes", for example, you want listry to be the #1 match in Google with a list of links to color themes.

That, and just balls: try to get some popular bloggers to cover your site. If they like the concept, they won't mind vouching for you.

Re: Today I launched my solo project, Listry. Feedback/suggestions appreciated

#14

Post by Spines11 »

techjohn wrote: post #9

Looks like you are using Google custom search. Can you please provide your perspective on the service.

It's very easy to set up, and it works alright. There is a delay for things to show up in the search results though. I think once app engine (which is what Listry runs on) implements full text search, I'll probably make my own solution using that.

Re: Today I launched my solo project, Listry. Feedback/suggestions appreciated

#15

Post by Spines11 »

ldh wrote: post #11

At least at this early stage with little content, the site seems very snappy. Looking at the blog, I'm assuming you're running on Google AppEngine? Can you give us an overview of how the site is implemented?

Thanks for noticing the speed :) I spent a lot of effort on that.

I built my own mini-framework for Google App Engine with a focus on speed. The main thing that makes it fast is that it utilizes public edge caching for most content, and the parts of the content that change from user to user are updated with javascript.

So with the home page, App Engine just serves a static page from it's edge cache, which is updated every 30 seconds, and the top bar of the site which is different if you are logged in is updated with javascript to show you different links if you are logged in.

Re: Today I launched my solo project, Listry. Feedback/suggestions appreciated

#17

Post by Spines11 »

jeff_5nines wrote: post #16

This is a really cool application. How do you intend on keeping out crap article and malicious updates? Either way, this is a nicely designed interface and great idea.

Thanks :)

For crap articles, people can vote them down, which will move them lower on the new articles tab and popular articles tab if they are voted low enough. Also, I can manually delete obviously crap articles, or close articles that don't fit the format.

For crap edits, they can be undone in the history tab of each article. I need to do a little work in making rollbacks easier though.

If I get a lot of traffic, I'll have to write some software to help identify malicious edits.

Re: Today I launched my solo project, Listry. Feedback/suggestions appreciated

#19

Post by Spines11 »

Simucal wrote: post #18

Congrats on the launch. I'm curious how your "popular" tab works. If it is simply sorted by votes with no time-component then your going to have the same "self-fulfilling prophecy" problem that Stack Overflow had when they first launched.

Thanks!

Right now the popular tab sorts things based on the votes for the article, and also the votes for the items within the article. So an article with good items can rank higher than an article with more votes, but no items.

Right now there isn't any time-component to the popular articles. I was thinking of having sub-tabs for "popular this week", "popular this month", and "popular all time", and then having the default be "popular this month".

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