HMO: Help Me Out

The idea being, if we know how people read we can help people learn better. Obviously, there are other uses such as improving reading speeds, comprehension, and more. Further, we can potentially learn how structuring of sentences can effect peoples interest and learning as well.

Github: https://github.com/lettergram/basicbookreader

Email: austin at agw.io

Currently, I need help with cleaning up the project, and enabling Epubs, PDFs, and HTML files to be read.

Future goals: make it compatible with android and iOS, set up a central location of the data, improve statistics functions. The current version on github does not have any statistics, I'll update later with a fully working version of statistics.

In fact, I had someone pick my brain just a few days ago because they want to build a professional-looking site for a friend, and they're comfortable with HTML and CSS, but they don't understand how Wordpress works.

I did find a few things that I think needs some work though.

You're presenting a commandline interface. I love commandline. I much prefer a sensible CLI to even the best graphical interfaces. But your target market? I'm not sure they'll like that nearly as much. If they were comfortable with CLI, they'd be probably be comfortable enough to find their way around a server. Is there any way you can manage testing & deployment without the CLI?

On your site, you advertise the virtues of a static site as being fast. But, in the video, images are loading slowly on your demo page. It really stood out to me. You might consider having the page's images already in your browser cache when you load the demo page.

And the video -- the video is really a bit rough. You're clicking around way too fast in the video. I had trouble keeping up with what you were doing. The page template you're using in the video isn't sexy at all, so that makes it less attractive to designers. Having some kind of default page template along the lines of what you'd find for Wordpress would probably be good.

The video was also too specific. You went into some detail on embedding podcasts or Soundcloud stuff, but didn't really explain any of the rest of the interface. In your intro video, I don't necessarily need to know step-by-step how to embed a podcast, I maybe only need to know that it's possible. At the end of the video, I still felt like I had no idea what Webhook could do, which sucks because although I'm not your target market, I probably know 6 people who are. Along the same lines, there were a number of typos and miscapitalized things in the video, and some of the dialog was a bit hokey (like when you remembered that you actually had to go into chat to invite a participant). This adds to the "rushed" feeling in the video.

And the thing is, it looks like you've got a really polished product! Then you have the video, which makes it feel a lot less professional.

Also, it seems like you could tap a secondary market, by hosting a template shop on your site and taking a cut from sales of the templates. Just because someone's comfortable with HTML & CSS doesn't necessarily mean that they want to start from scratch. With the explosion in popularity of things like Bootstrap, I think there's pretty good evidence that people are avoiding that as much as possible.

I run a meetup and organized a conference to help folks who are working on or want to found a hw startup. Would love to connect over email with folks interested in the field and find out what their biggest frustrations are so I can develop my blog content and offer some more educational and fun events. First one is here: http://boot.lvhardware.com

Would also be interested in trading hardware work for coding/design skills or tutoring.

I can help: Hardware design verification, general advice on finding suppliers, kickstarter strategy, etc.

Minor thing upfront: The Signin-Workflow. First, signing in with Google, ok. Then, signing in again with Google into Forum? That didn't work, I tried it multiple times, until I just waited a bit after the login and the forum appeared by itself.

I'm behind a slow, flaky connection, but she seemed to be alright that moment.