Review My One-Day Project: Shared Words | Hacker News Reader

Review My One-Day Project: Shared Words

sharedwords.org

I know we like to keep Hacker News non-political, but I can't help this. Get a load of Fox. Could they be any more blatant? I mean, seriously! Compare their five most shared headlines with all the other news sites. You read those and you think the world's going to end. Then you read the other headlines and its like wait, the world's not ending?

They don't seem that much worse to me. "School Children 'Blown Up' for Not Fighting Climate Change in Controversial Ad" is actually remarkably factual.

Even the BBC has the headline "US gave syphilis to mentally ill", which omits the minor detail that the event happened 60 years ago.

Of all the headlines, the most 'normal' seems to be Al-Jazeera.

It's strange, given everything you hear about Al-Jazeera back in the states, but their English language service is the best news I've ever gotten short of NPR's All Things Considered or the PBS New Hour.

I was never even exposed to it until we got here to Thailand. And all you hear about Al-Jazeera back in the states is bad stuff. They are an Islamic broadcast station. Said in that way to mean extremist, terrorist or theocratic. But they're not! They're like the BBC world only less sensational and with better investigative journalism. That or they're so sneaky and subtle about it that I'm being brainwashed by subliminal messaging and am not even aware of it.

I spent some time in Qatar years back and got to know a couple of guys that were working there then when it was being set up. They wanted to have an Arab equivalent to the BBC or CNN. They were very impressed with the first Gulf War coverage on CNN and with the BBC's quality, but wanted an unbiased Arab news channel that would make the middle east the primary focus, rather than solely a source of trouble.

I tend to find there's not much by way of Islamic content in it (compared to other state news channels in the region) but the quality is far greater than say, Russia Today.

I would guess that in this case the headlines tell you more about the readers than the medium.

This could be especially interesting as a record if you start archiving by day or perhaps week. Imagine jumping back to a Shared Words page just about this time two years ago...

Also, I see you have "Seattle;" are you toying with the idea of adding regional groupings of sources?

As the database grows i'll definitely look into adding time-based views. I added Seattle because that's where I live, but I'm planning on adding some customization features so you could make it regional.

Like the Tech page a lot and the idea in general.

Some thoughts/suggestions:

- Change the font. Really distracting.

- Like the simplicity and little splash of color provided by the favicons.

- Agree with photon_off on the popup menu. It also overlaps with its headline.

- I'd make the 'shared by' column more subtle (e.g., gray text instead) so the headlines jump out more.

- Add some padding between it and the headline as the longer headlines run right into it.

- A more visual way of representing the 'shared by' column might be nicer as well. It's not clear it matters to me exactly how many people shared an article but getting a sense of one headline vs. the others seems valuable.

- Totally a personal preference for me, but how repetitive "People" is in the 'shared by' column distracts me; the fact that it's a capital 'P' does too. :)

Nice work though. I can see this becoming a nice browser home page if you add some more customizability around the sources and their ordering.

Thanks, excellent feedback. I'll do all of this. Also, I do plan on adding some more customization options.

I would also move source column to right. Readers want to focus on article titles, not where it came from.

I like it. I spent a few minutes looking at some headlines and was satisfied with it.

I think it's more important to group stories by category (if it's possible), than it is by source.

Where are you getting the "shared" data from? Ah, I see it says "facebook" on the bottom. What's the specific API call to get this data?

I dislike the menu thing that pops up when I hover over a link. It is distracting. There's no need for it to be that easily accessible, because most of the time I won't use the feature, and it doesn't need to be shown before I even click through to the link. Perhaps show a little + icon to the left (or right) of the link, and have it open up this menu when I click it.

One last thing, I really dislike the font.

All-in-all, a very nice production. I've bookmarked it and will probably check it once a day. Good work.

+1 for not being keen on the font. Or, more accurately, the typography. Goudy isn't a horrible font but it doesn't work well at the sizes used, the source titles don't line up with the stories, the leading is bad in the "logo", and so on.

Even just diving to Georgia (or Helvetica) with default leading and getting the layout grid right would make a massive difference to this page.

I'll move back to helvetica or lucida grande when I move it onto a proper grid. For data, I'm screen scraping facebook's recommendations iframe source for different domains.

I'll see about better grouping and definitely will change the popup menu. Thanks for the feedback!

A comments section for the stories would be cool too. Make it like HN. It feels so lonely without community feedback.

Very nice. I am beginning to use these summary sites more often.

I did notice one thing/error: Some of the titles for the stories don't show up correctly and are just the URL to the story. Sometimes you can tell what the story is from the URL but this is not always the case, especially for HN URLs.

Awesome. Finally. I really needed a news site like this. I'm tired of reading the same articles all over the place.

More so, I hate having to explain to some of my nerd friends, "yeah I read that too."

Now hopefully it can be implied that we all read the same stuff.

Very nice, it would be cool to sort by topic.

also I would want to change the order of the sources.

I'm definitely planning on adding customization features.

The numbers seem a bit implausible to me. The top Fox News page only has 530 shares? A sixth as many as the top Huffington Post story? Maybe my sense of US media empires' importance is skewed.

I think I've just found my new news site. My only issue is the way the sharing links work- I browse a bit from my phone and iPad, and neither like mouseovers much. Works great though!

I'm planning on adding a custom iOS interface. I just haven't had a chance yet. Soon though!

Please include http://foxnews.com and http://salon.com to cover the extreme ends.

Great Idea, just one thing: consider adding a favicon, I don't use titles in my bookmarks so I have no way to identify your website in my bookmarks bar.

Nice and clean look. Have you considered lexical parsing to generate a list of trending phrases?

I suppose there are several possibilities to track trends this way.

Great job.

That's definitely something I'm considering doing in the future...Maybe on day 3 :)

It's great. I just miss two features to be an everyday use service:

- Time periods: Shares in a week, month, year - Being able to add the sites each user like

Great work!

Looks interesting. Wouldn't it be better if you ranked the news sources in descending order of total shares instead of alphabetically?

I agree, I want to know the most popular sites and the most popular articles overall.

I'm working on a very similar site (though also decidedly different), and I can tell you the challenge I've found in that is publisher bias. For example, if I'm looking at 30 technology sites, and sort out by site, the content looks like a fair representation of what's popular in the world -- however, if I sort just by popularity, almost the entire page consists of HN and TechCrunch posts.

It's a tricky balance, but I'm also working on it. :-)

Awesome. tweets

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