Ask HN: Review Merecal, a new release notification website

#1

Post by bernzilla » Fri, Jul 24, 2009, 6:09 AM UTC

We just launched Merecal today. It's a site for tracking new and upcoming releases in books, movies, music and video games that can be personalized based on your own interests. We'd love for you to take a look and give us any feedback you might have. Thanks in advance!

http://merecal.com/

http://blog.merecal.com/2009/07/23/weve-launched/

Re: Ask HN: Review Merecal, a new release notification website

#2

Post by sidmitra » Fri, Jul 24, 2009, 6:20 AM UTC

Looks great! Haven't signed up yet, but will take a look later... so far it seems pretty useful to me. I was looking for something like this to keep track of music releases.

Re: Ask HN: Review Merecal, a new release notification website

#3

Post by astrec » Fri, Jul 24, 2009, 8:51 AM UTC

Nice one :)

A wishlist api/widget might be a good way to promote the site, and you should install the FF SenSEO plug-in as there are a few things you can improve on that front.

Re: Ask HN: Review Merecal, a new release notification website

#4

Post by ScottWhigham » Fri, Jul 24, 2009, 1:34 PM UTC

Nice. I tried to look through the Jazz music new releases and bailed after the first page. Why? When I clicked "Jazz", it showed me 8 or 10 albums but at the bottom it said, "Page 1 of 52". Sorry - I'm not interesting in 52 page views to see what's up and coming.

Neat idea though.

Re: Ask HN: Review Merecal, a new release notification website

#5

Post by bernzilla » Fri, Jul 24, 2009, 3:55 PM UTC

ScottWhigham wrote: post #4

Nice. I tried to look through the Jazz music new releases and bailed after the first page. Why? When I clicked "Jazz", it showed me 8 or 10 albums but at the bottom it said, "Page 1 of 52". Sorry - I'm not interesting in 52 page views to see what's up and coming. Neat idea though.

Thanks for taking a look, Scott. If you register, one of the many benefits is you get to decide how many items are displayed per page. So you can set it to 100, for example, and therefore have far fewer pages to explore. There's also the list of subcategories on the left, if you wish to drill down and get more specific that way.

Re: Ask HN: Review Merecal, a new release notification website

#6

Post by bernzilla » Fri, Jul 24, 2009, 4:22 PM UTC

astrec wrote: post #3

Nice one :) A wishlist api/widget might be a good way to promote the site, and you should install the FF SenSEO plug-in as there are a few things you can improve on that front.

We've definitely been thinking along those lines as far as the wishlist goes. We want to explore ways to make the site more social.

Thanks for the tip on the SenSEO add-on. I hadn't seen that before. It looks like we're doing pretty well in quite a few areas, but could also still use some tweaking in others (especially keyword relevance).