Show HN: The Hawaii Project – A personalized book discovery system | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: The Hawaii Project – A personalized book discovery system

thehawaiiproject.com

32 pointsviking291726 comments

As usual with this kind of thing, I've spent about five minutes looking round the site just to get a general feel of the thing. Here are my first impressions:

1. This is a great idea. I'm /always/ looking for book recommendations and I find that Goodreads doesn't do the job for me.

2. Thank you for giving me a 'Not yet, I just want to look around' button. This turned a potentially irritating moment to a moment of 'Huh... that's a nice touch'.

3. I'm afraid I say that I think the design is horrible. Not necessarily layout, but more the CSS, e.g. the background colour, the style of the buttons, etc.

4. I think there's too much stuff in the navbar at the top. This includes a few things that I don't really know what to do with. It's all a bit cluttered, and that makes me a bit anxious. Couldn't this be stripped down a bit?

5. The menu is absolutely full of options, some of which seem a bit repetitive. I've got 'Edit my authors', 'Edit my channels', 'Personalise', etc. Isn't there a way all this kind of stuff can be put in one place?

6. When I click 'Edit authors', I'm not really sure why I have to do this on a separate page (or indeed why I'm telling you about /authors/ I like). Can't I just tell you which books I like?

7. I don't really know what 'My Articles' is. I wouldn't mind something that /only/ dealt with books.

8. Loading times are a /bit/ on the slow side, especially on the 'Recommendations' page.

Conclusion: Interesting idea, so I've signed up. For me, the biggest thing that needs to improve is the general look of the site (not necessarily layout, but the CSS), followed by the fact that everything feels a bit cluttered.

This is all just my opinion, though...!

Thank you this is great feedback. I agree with you the navbar is kind of a mess. I've got a code branch in progress to clean that up substantially.

I'm a recovering executive remembering how to code, and my design skills are awful. I have a designer friend giving me styling advice. It is too heavy. I was going for that hawaii feel but I think it's too much :)

My articles is getting a revamp shortly - the gist is, just as you can get book recommendations, you can get article recommendations about books - kind of a Flipboard for Books or StumbleUpon for Books. But that feature is still formative....i.e. not really ready for primetime.

Thanks for this. Keep it coming. You can find my email address on the About Us page if you want to send more.

ACK on 2) - I was about to close it again when I saw the button to look around.

I only did a few searches and sadly only found one of the books I recently read/started (and the only "well-known" one) - the one I didn't like that much.

which books are we missing? want to take a look....thx.

For example 'Spin' by Robert Charles Wilson and some other SciFi titles (not many I checked)

Thanks for passing that along. Spin is actually in the system (http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Spin--by--Robert-Charle...) but I think my keyword search ranking approach isn't picking it up in the keyword search box...something to improve.

Is there an advantage here over Goodreads?

The design could use quite a bit of help, but otherwise this could be something I could use.

How are the recommendations generated?

Goodreads tends to be more of a socially-driven environment, I find that my friends don't read what I read.

The Hawaii Project is constantly scanning what the blogosphere is writing about in terms of books, and then matching that to your tastes and interests (topics, authors, website sources), so the recommendations always stay fresh and timely - vs Goodreads, which tends to be pretty static (if you like X you'll like Y). I may not care about all the books that say, the New York Times Book Review writes about, but if I'm into historical fiction and they review a book of that sort, I'll get a recommendation for it.

THP also has an index of articles from the web about particular books, and the ability to quickly browse what sites are writing about - kind of like a books-oriented news reader

It also generates a weekly mail with books that match your interests and authors that are being written about, so you don't have to go looking for them or miss a book from your favorite author.

And yes, my design skills need help :)

Would it be fair to say it's sort of like a Hype Machine but for books?

I'm also always interested in hearing about books that authors I like are reading or maybe books that they've been influenced by.

Regarding the design, there is definitely a lot of gradients and drop shadows happening which makes the page feel "heavy" and not relaxing like I think Hawaii brings to mind. I'm not sure if it's that but something is making the large grid layouts to load slowly on both my desktop and laptop.

Very much so, like Hype Machine (which I love), with the caveat that THP is personalized, whereas Hype Machine is more one-size-fits-all in terms of the music it recommends, it doesn't really know whether I like EDM or Jazz and act accordingly.

thanks for notes on design. I suspect the page loading is because my server's getting hammered right now :)

Cool, thanks for explaining that. I'll try it out.

thank you. feedback welcome.

How many blogs do you scan? How do you add/remove blogs to the list?

It's around 800 right now - I curate all the source sites by hand at present, to ensure quality. If there's something you think I should add let me know...

FYI, I browse with cookies and localStorage disabled... your site doesn't come up at all for me. I understand that as a logged-in user I'd need to have cookies enabled, but for just browsing around the site it seems weird that it wouldn't show me any content at all.

Whoops. I use a 3rd party tool to manage user data and that requires access to local storage. I'll have to look into engineering that requirement out unless you have a user account. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Let me investigate. Neither of those should be required but perhaps something's busted. Browser you're using?

Current version of Chrome on Mac OSX El Capitan.

I'm not using an ad blocker or anything, just have "Block sites from setting any data" checked in Settings > Show Advanced Settings > Privacy > Content Settings > Cookies.

Thanks.

Thanks. I can reproduce when I set "block sites from setting any data", caused by a 3rd party tool I use. I will have to figure some way to fix it. Thanks for reporting. In the meantime if you want to explore you'll have to turn that setting off... :(

It's not working for me. Firefox 42/ OS X El Capitan

http://i.imgur.com/6vlsFMY.png

Thanks. Looks like jquery's not loading. either it's because of load, or perhaps you have javascript blocked? (more likely somehow load related. I'll take a look)

they don't have "The New Turing Omnibus" service fail.

Thanks for looking. Because I get book recommendations from the blogosphere, older books don't get found as quickly unless someone is writing about them.... I added in Omnibus - here: http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/The-New-Turing-Omnibus-.... Thanks!

thanks, and it led me to find Turtle Geometry which looks like it could be an interesting book.

whoever voted this down, must have never read the book.

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