My create-your-own-social-news-site startup is live. Feedback appreciated. | Hacker News Reader

My create-your-own-social-news-site startup is live. Feedback appreciated.

slinkset.com

50 pointsbrett46 comments

I Like, I love the design, the colors works well for me. The layout also pleases me:) KISS ( Keep It Stupid Simple) I feel like a mix between Jottit and Digg Create your little Digg site with the ease of creation like Jottit.

I recommend.

Very nice, well done, I have to agree. Reminds me of Basecamp.

Was very easy to get started that is for sure

I agree. The design is very nice.

Thanks.

Great work Brett. Very polished for getting started. You need to figure out how you can beat Reddit's new "build your own reddit" system. Maybe focusing on certain niches like families that like to share links (mine!), pet lovers, sports fans, etc. I think you could make fast inroads by figuring out how you can target folks like that rather than going after reddit.com head on.

Im curious as to why you think reddit can't serve those niches right now? You can create a private reddit just for you and your family, you can create a pet lover reddit, a reddit for you favorite sports team, etc. Is this perhaps a marketing problem of reddit's?

Design thing that irks me: Seems like a number of mouse hovers trigger an object to get duller rather than brighter. That seems like the opposite of what you want to happen.

How is this different than user created reddits on reddit? The only difference I see is that you can change the colors here.

However, I will say that the colors are nice. :)

potentially they can add custom domains too, I do not think reddit will let you customize your subreddits too much :)

Not necessarily a minor difference. People have added blogs and message boards provided by 3rd parties and themed them so that they appear integrated with the main site. Does it follow that there might be a demand for an "integrated" niche social news equivalent? Kind of reminds me of ning too.

Ditto. Providing the ability to integrate such a link sharing/voting app into an existing website would make slinkset stand out! May I ask why the name slinkset? I don't get the name.

There's not really anything to get. I'm more worried about you being able to remember and spell it.

Yeah that customizable themes idea never worked out for myspace, or blogs, or web stores....

Regular people go crazy for that stuff. They should expand on this feature even more.

http://slinkset.com/signup_and_create

The vertical divider in the page made me think I only had to fill out one side or the other. "Setup your account" or "Setup your site" I thought. So I figured I could create my network just by entering title/URL/privacy option. Only after a little confusion did I realize it's not "or", but actually "and".

I find the star with an inverted star below it for up/downvoting a little off.

Like the design simplicity. A possible idea on how to differentiate it from reddit. Consider having an option that makes it almost like a media producer.

What I mean is, while the post link is interesting, when it comes to something like Hacker News I always click through for the comments, because they're usually great. What about combining this idea with almost a kind of private access and putting the point system to more use?

For example: You have the link (or topic) that is submitted as they are now, and then the discussion that occurs from the link (or topic). As people like it, they vote it up or down (giving it points). However, all this discussion is taking place not in public view (recalling the invite only). But each day a submission goes public (also opening up comments) based on which one has the most points. This essentially creates 1 piece of interesting material a day (similar to that of a blog) based on dynamic discussion.

Just a thought.

You should pre-fetch the rollover images in the "Featured Slinkset Sites" on the front page. Currently when the page first loads, there is a split second when you mouse-over the screenshots where the image completely disappears as it's loading the hover image. Otherwise the design looks very nice.

Thanks for the tip. We've been meaning to go the css sprite route on those, but haven't gotten to it yet.

Nice job man. The whole process from the user's end is about as simple and painless as it can get - something that, if done poorly, will kill a site quicker then anything. Nice concept and seemingly small/few bugs/issues for a just launched site. Kudos!

Add comments (or use disqus) and allow people to use their own domains.

We actually have comments. Clearly that's not obvious if you are not logged in (and no one has yet commented on a link on the page). Something we should look at.

You should make the comment link visible, but require registration to actually post a comment. You should not hide any features from unregistered users, just require registration before they are used.

Neat! I was just thinking that we need something like this for our family, instead of emailing each other news articles all the time.

Since this is RoR-based, I assume it's RESTful?

Ok, so I created an account; it was a great experience. There are several requests I have:

1. Let users add custom CSS to it, so they can customize it the way they want. 2. Let users add a custom subdomain.

Cool. Both of those are on our todo list. Using an arbitrary domain works, but we haven't put it in the ui because it requires some work from the user and we want to make sure there is appropriate help so that it does not confuse anyone.

Awesome! As mentioned in the grandparent post, we're using it for family news, and we have a suggestion: give users the ability to hide certain links from certain users for a temporary period of time. For example, if my dad has a birthday coming up and we want to throw him a surprise birthday party, we can start a discussion link about organizing it, and have him not be able to see it. That news item would be hidden from him until 1 day after his birthday, or something like that; same thing for anniversaries.

and to think '' there are thousands of people paying for a service like this at myfamily.com ( a few more features, but barely)

Good idea, good execution. High five.

high five back.

I created one http://justnews.slinkset.com/ For anyone who is tired of all the stupid news commentary, and just wants new.

It would be nice to be able to increase the font size on the Hacker News ripoff design.

Why did you name it SlinkSet?

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?

If I set my site to "private", the "Users" link gives me a 500 error ("We have a piper down"). If I change it to Public it works fine. I would still expect to be able to invite users to a private site.

Yeah that was a bug; I just deployed a fix. We weren't ready for people putting periods in their usernames. My guess is that you changed it to public right after the fix. Thanks.

What technologies did you use to create the site? Is this Rails based?

seems like rails: "Server Mongrel 1.1.4" in response headers, application.js with prototype.js in the scripts.

Yeah. It's rails.

Pretty awesome. Slinkset looks like a great idea, good execution.

Nice job. Have you thought about how you'll monetize it?

We're still nailing that down, but I think we've got some decent ideas...

Cool. Simple design. Very easy to get started. http://ghost.slinkset.com

It would be nice to have some kind of preview feature, either in the form of a demo, or existing pages.

very cool - i've been waiting for something like this for ages. can i please echo the request for a webpage plug-in? it'd be nice to drag and drop this into something else rather than have the visitor leave my space.

Great job, the design is nice. Just curious - about how long did it take to do?

holy shit, you nailed the signup experience. I'm wondering though, by not verifying emails or even having a captcha, are you worried about undesirables turning your site into a spam/link farm?

Add a username/password captions to the login form on your homepage.

Little tip: On the sign-up page, there's a big line between the "Set Up Your Account" and "Set Up Your Site" form. It looks as if it are two separate forms and you should choose one. Maybe you can tinker with it a little bit to make it look more as one whole.

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