Hacker News Reader

It seems like a good approach. The only thing that throws me off is the two columns with tabs; which tabs go where seems arbitrary to me (but maybe it's not and I just don't know that). I wonder if it would work to split it between the types of channels, with one column for social/submitted/aggregated news (Digg, Slashdot, HN) and another for the primary sources.

View on HN

What I tried to do was split by section, then within each section split by source type. Some work better than others but for example the tech section is split mostly by social media, primary sources, e-zines (sort of), and major blogs.

The division isn't intuitive to me at this point, but maybe I rely too much on actual labels/headers. I think it's little things that throw me off, like Digg being separate from its counterparts on the Tech page.

Admittedly, the organization is quite arbitrary. I wanted to have what I thought would be the most popular tabs up on page load, to reduce the number of AJAX requests and secondly because that's mostly what people want to read. For the tech page I thought more people would be interested in reading Digg, rather than PC World or CNET so I moved Digg to occupy a first position in a different box.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com