Please review my HN November app | Hacker News Reader

Please review my HN November app

previouslook.com

35 pointsww52022 comments

I wish there was a way to enter MY site and have it regularly take a snapshot weekly, monthly, yearly. That way, a year from now I could have a record of what things looked like and what happened over that year, without having to think about it. I would pay a few bucks for a system that did that. Sort of like a personal internet archive.

Allowing anyone to define the crawling policy and snapshot any site is in the plan. I need to build up the UI for the backend process to crawl and transform the webpages. I'm building the backend tools as I go along. So far it's just a proof of concept with couple sites defined. Once the tools are ready, I'll open the backend up.

I was very impressed to see the left and right arrow keys work "as expected" when tested. To be specific, the keys on the keyboard.

Unfortunately, the arrowish >>> and <<< links are broken. When the page first loads, it give the most recent snapshot, which is nice. The problem with the arrowish links is they do not allow you to go backwards in time, but do allow you to go forward in time, hence causing an error since the future hasn't happened yet. ;)

Thanks for feedback! All credits of the arrow keys working go to JQuery. :)

The <<< and >>> are my poorman's UI implementation of left and right arrows. It seems the prefetching has some problem when going left and right too fast. I'm turning prefetching off and re-deploying the app. It'll be up in a moment.

hmmm... Of course you know your code far better than I do, and I'm just guessing here, but on the omega (most recent snap), the 'forward-in-time' arrowish >>> links existed when they should not exist. At the same time, the 'backwards-in-time' arrowish links <<< did not exist (i.e. you can see the characters but they were not actually links).

Since from the most recent snapshot, the only option should be to go backwards in time (rather than forward), it seems you have your logic reversed somewhere.

Can I ask what browser, version, and platform are you using? I've tested it on Firefox 3.6, Opera 10, and IE 9 on Windows, and the <<< and >>> seem to work. When you hover the mouse on top of the <<< characters, is there a underline showing up?

There's no enabling/disabling of the <<< and >>> links, (though it might be a good idea to show/hide depending on the current snapshot). They are just anchor with href=#, with Javascript to handle the mouse click. The links should always be there.

There are CSS styles modifying the anchor links. Here're the CSS I use for the A links.

a:link { text-decoration:none; }

a:visited { text-decoration:none; }

a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }

The underline only shows up when the mouse is hovering on the links.

  $ uname -a   
  OpenBSD lynx.foo.bar 4.7 GENERIC#642 i386
  $ firefox -v 
  Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3, Copyright (c) 1998 - 2010 mozilla.org
  $ date -u
  Tue Nov 30 08:21:05 UTC 2010

Yes, I need to upgrade this particular box.

Tested with you "HackerNews Newest" snapshot set.

As previously stated, only the 'forward' link appeared, and the 'back' was just plain characters rather than a link, when the omega (first snapshot) was initially loaded. Yes, I noticed the hover.

Since you mentioned making changes and rebooting your app/site, I just gave it another try and the behavior has changed. Now both the 'back' and 'forward' links exist on omega (most recent snap). Both of the "Previous Time Slot" and "Previous Batch" links work now.

The only thing left to fix is the handling of 'forward' links ("Next Time Slot" and "Next Batch") and the 'forward' key-press (right arrow key) when already displaying omega (most recent snap).

On the other hand, if you have some magical way to display snapshots of stuff before it happens, then you really need to start tracking stock symbols. ;-)

Most importantly, congratulations on delivering your November app. It is very nicely done.

I'll set up OpenBSD VM to test it out. That's very detail bug report. Thanks!

Very cool. I'd definitely pay for a service to give me a history of my web apps over time. I'm often asked when we implemented a feature and have to dive back into (poorly documented) subversion commits. This would be much easier in many cases.

Would love to hear the storage/cost requirements for archiving a site over, say a year. (I guess that would depend on archive frequency).

So far the storage is minimal since it only archives one page over time. It also transforms the page to extract only the stuff it needs to display, cutting down on the size further. Archiving a whole site with all the media (pic/sounds/videos) would take more storage. But disks are cheap these days. It shouldn't be too bad.

I'll look into that. Thanks.

Nice idea.

I know it's early days but the header and the takes that reads "Previous Look | web page snapshots over time" doesn't seem a very high resolution i.e. the text looks a little jagged on Chrome.

This is petty I know but it's the first thing I noticed.

Functionality wise though, nice work :D

Wow, I actually spent some time to add the text-shadow and etched effect to the letters to make them blur. Didn't realize it invokes the opposite reaction. My design sense sucks. Should have followed the KISS principle. Thanks for the honest feedback.

It might just be my monitor, I'm viewing this from work on an XP machine - so it might just be ClearType not working properly.

I liked it. The logo text in the header does not link to home page. Is it deliberate?

Thanks for the feedback. No, the logo text doesn't link was an oversight. The logo image links back to home; I thought that was enough. I'll add the link to the logo text as well.

Good idea, good functionality but get a designer on this ASAP. To users, design of the app IS the app.

One quick fix on the front page - "What does it do" and "Start Exploring" should have matching capitalization schemes.

Thanks for noticing the capitalization. I'll fix it. A designer probably will take it up to another level, but I can't afford one for now. :)

Looks like fun. I would like to see a play button, like etherpad. Also live scrubbing would be nice: as the user scrubs the timeline it could show the pages, rate-limited to 10Hz or something.

Playing it forward or backward is an excellent idea, like a VCR. I'll try to put it in. Live scrubbing while sliding was intentionally turned off. I figured it doesn't let people read the content while flying over the pages, while hitting the server with each page. It mainly shows a visual effect without real benefit. But if people really want it, I can put it back on.

In Chrome 7.0.517.44 on OS X the green headings partially overlap the elements of the page above them.

Thanks. I'll try it out in Chrome to fix it.

that is an awesome way to look back on past post on HN. I will use. Thanks

Reply on news.ycombinator.com