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Comment by nmb | Hacker News Reader

A few friends and I made this web app yesterday (our first!) instead of studying for finals. You provide a reasonably high-quality photo, and it helps you make a Facebook profile like the ones shown on the landing page. It's definitely not everything we wish it were (due to limitations in GAE and the python Facebook API library), but we're proud of it for the amount of time it took us to make it and definitely plan to iterate on it. Let us know if you have feedback, or find this useful at all.

Thanks, Nish

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This looked really exciting before I used it, but has taken me one hour so far, and been fairly frustrating.

First getting my eyes inside the area took a bucketload of image cropping and editing. You don't even have guidelines to help me so it was trial and error.

Then, tagging from 5 to 1 still isn't reproducing the images in order. I've tried multiple times.

If this were automated it would be better... I agree. 2 hard to complete.

1. Yep, if not face recognition, then let me use the arrows to move the picture up and down.

2. They can fix this with better instructions. I finally un-tagged and re-tagged all my pics without from 5 to 1 without re-uploading them to get the correct order.

3 (new). I forgot to say thank you. I was having trouble with the app and I should have been more gentlemanly. Sorry.

Thank you! This was good for a beta and the results look OK with some fiddling.

Yea. We are working on UI for next iteration!

Ah, didn't see this post. Glad you finally got it working! Do you think it would have been more clear to suggest that users upload the album, save it, and then proceed to tag themselves?

Try the demo ui at: http://fromjeffrey.com/pc/ and see if it works better for you - supports live preview, move, rotate, and scale.

Originally we were planning Facebook integration so that we'd have one click image uploads and tagging to Facebook, but the FB API has been in flux lately so it's taken longer than expected. We're pretty happy with what we have over two nights of hacking. =]

Keep the comments coming!

Thanks for trying out our hack! I'm sorry you've experienced frustration, and as epiphany47 has posted, we are working on an interface that makes the process easier. I haven't heard of anyone else having the same tagging issue as you...in all cases that I've seen tagging from 5 to 1 works well. I'm afraid there's not much that can be done if the tagging process for your profile seems to be nondeterministic. =/

Why is that I also have the biggest urge to code something fun when the time is best used to get good grades?

>Why is that I also have the biggest urge to code something fun when the time is best used to get good grades?

According to PG, "There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. ... The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination, because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things."

I would guess coding something fun instead of doing school work falls into (b) for most people who do it. Reasons: 1) Being fun makes it easier to do. 2) If it has sufficient complexity over the school work one can rationalize to themselves that working on it is more important (for learning) than getting good grades.

full link: http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

I'm pretty sure this is exactly the mental process I went through. After this round of comments I really should get back to studying!

It's a tad scary to quote PG on every corner and idolize him so much, but, it's hard not to: he appears to have an article on everything.

If it doesn't upload the images, why does it need to connect to Facebook?

Our server load is already pretty high right now as it is, so we can't really afford to provide the service without this slight barrier.

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