Comment by epi0Bauqu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epi0Bauqu | Hacker News Reader

http://watrcoolr.us

Never "launched" it, but I still think it deserves popularity :).

It's a browser start page that I made for myself (and use) that displays the top stories for a set of most-emailed-like feeds. The feeds have been tweaked over time to yield the most interesting stories at any given time. After all, they were the most emailed ones...

It's not really for news junkies or the news.yc crowd in particular. However, it could work for you as I am in the news.yc crowd. Anyway, almost everyone I have explained it to and that has tried it as their homepage has liked it. That is, I've gotten really good feedback in terms of constant use from friends and family.

So I think there is some non-negligible subset of people who would like this as their home page, but I of course have no way to reach them :)

If you do click on it, note it isn't just one story. You can click the arrows on screen or use the arrows on your keyboard to move off the front story. But if you have as your home page, the latest story will just be displayed.

This site is very, very cool. I really appreciate super-minimalistic UI's like this. I've bookmarked it. :)

I have to say the arrow key navigation is awesome. I hate to have to click all over and the fact that there is only one story at a time yet I can navigate to others easily is very appealing.

Totally agree with other posters. This is a neat interface - I like how it completely takes away the clutter, allowing you to focus on the current story. User configurable, perhaps? No-cycling, custom feed selections, etc.

Personally, I would like longer excerpts...two to four line excerpts just don't cut it for me. However, I presume that's a function of the provider's feed settings. Also, some of the feeds are just...meh. I don't care for Abby, Drudge, etc.

Question, why load a new page for each story?

Most of the excerpt lengths are from the feeds, though I am cutting it off after one paragraph. The idea is you would quickly move through them and click through to the story if you want.

I don't understand your question about the new page. Can you please expand? There shouldn't be a new page load for each story, i.e. when you hit the arrow keys it should be taking the excerpts from memory.

As for the feed choice, these are just general interest feeds of course. I've thought about custom feeds, but then this just becomes another feed reader (and a worse one at that). I think its usefulness stems from the aggregation, i.e. you do no work to get a snapshot of the most emailed stories out there. And since they are not your feeds, you don't really care if you miss something.

That being said, I can really see some sub-watrcoolrs. What would you think of a hacker oriented one? Any feed ideas?

Also, what do you mean by "no-cycling?" Thanks for the feedback.

We should start a movement for watrcooler. Love the design, especially the keyboard nav

Well, I'm certainly interested in spreading it, I just don't have any great ideas for how to do so. At one point I had it so you could email the links off the site to other people, but it wasn't used much so I dropped it in favor of dropping clutter.

OK, I brought it to the front page of proggit: http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/6j9dt/comments/ (might fall away soon)

Thanks. I saw your comment on not liking the stories :)

Do you think you would use a tech subwatrcoolr? If so, what "most emailed" equiv. feeds do you think there are in tech. I can think of programming.reddit.com, equivalent digg section, news.yc, yahoo most emailed tech.

That's one great UI, thanks for sharing!

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