Seeking alpha testers for Beepl | Hacker News Reader

Seeking alpha testers for Beepl

1 pointjparicka21 comments

We have an early alpha out, and I was wondering if I can find some volunteer alpha testers over here? The address is http://alpha.beepl.com

I cannot wait to hear back from you. Thanks!

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I tried to log in with twitter and got the following, using Opera 11 on Windows 7:

Incorrect string value: '\xE3\x81\x8C\xE3\x81\xAA...' for column 'text' at row 1Request Method: GET Request URL: http://alpha.beepl.com/register/new Django Version: 1.2.4 Exception Type: Warning Exception Value: Incorrect string value: '\xE3\x81\x8C\xE3\x81\xAA...' for column 'text' at row 1 Exception Location: /opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/warnings.py in warn_explicit, line 102 Python Executable: /opt/bitnami/python/bin/.python.bin Python Version: 2.5.4 Python Path: ['/home/jparicka/svn/beepl', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/site-packages/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.5.egg', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3c1-py2.5-linux-i686.egg', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/site-packages/tweepy-1.7.1-py2.5.egg', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/site-packages/simplejson-2.1.2-py2.5-linux-i686.egg', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/site-packages/oauth2-1.2.0-py2.5.egg', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/site-packages/httplib2-0.6.0-py2.5.egg', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/site-packages/rdflib-2.4.2-py2.5-linux-i686.egg', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/site-packages/jsonlib-1.6.1-py2.5-linux-i686.egg', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/site-packages/oauth_python_twitter-1.0-py2.5.egg', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/site-packages/python_twitter-0.6-py2.5.egg', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/site-packages/flup-1.0.1-py2.5.egg', '/opt/bitnami/apps/django/lib/python2.5/site-packages', '/home/jparicka/svn/beepl', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python25.zip', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/plat-linux2', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/lib-tk', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/lib-dynload', '/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python2.5/site-packages'] Server time: Sat, 15 Jan 2011 12:51:25 +0000

Going to the page in a new tab shows that I'm logged in fine, apparently.

As a side note, the font that you use in the post-it notes looks like Comic Sans, which makes it look a bit tacky. Perhaps a font that's more clearly different from Comic Sans or closer to "handwriting" would help?

Will do. Thanks!

Ouch .. busy server. We have this running off of a single 1GB GoGrid server. :-(

Yeah, don't forget to set DEBUG = False. The above error message should never been seen by users. Also, when DEBUG = True Django stores all SQL queries (and other stuff I don't remember now)* in memory*. Not good.

I'm not quite sure what the bee logo that shows up on beeps (tweets?) is for. There's nothing to indicate what it does when I mouseover, and the page it takes me to is filled with all kinds of stuff.

I was looking for a way to respond to answers.

Now that I'm logged in, here's a feature suggestion... it would be kind of cool to be able to flip through suggested questions randomly, or perhaps look at "genres" of questions if you're in an answering mood.

Sounds good. Our idea is to match relevant questions to you - those in which you expressed the strongest interest. This is what will effectively turn beepl into a question distribution platform. I am hoping to have this in place sometimes next week. Thanks for a great feedback!!

A quick note for those who signed in (thank you for that btw), you can send questions to beepl directly from Twitter simply by adding #ask hashtag to them.

My biggest complaint is that there's no page to explain what beepl is or how it works -- things I'd like to know before I sign in with my Twitter account.

Good point. Once you sign in, it allows you to ask questions via twitter, simply by adding #ask hashtag to them. Beepl finds these questions, semantically analyse them, find the experts and the relevant answers and prompts you once it figured out the answer. I will try to communicate it better on the home page. Great feedback, thanks!

That explanation's good enough for me, honestly; if it were listed simply on a separate, clearly linked page, I would be satisfied.

It also picks up in_replies to these questions and aggregates them in one place - on beepl that is.

One would really need to sign in and ask a question to experiece this.

PS - please keep in mind this is ALPHA. Things change every day as I'm working on it.

Thank you, folks. Great feedback.

Although, I really hoped someone will ask some question to give this a try.. It's just a prototype anyway. So thanks again.

Hmm, I tried asking a few questions through beepl's interface with the twitter checkbox selected, but none of them are actually showing up as my tweets.

Yeah, I disabled this temporarily. I thought it's not a good idea to allow this in the alpha stage.

Ah. Might want to let users know when it's disabled, even in Alpha. If I hadn't been able to ask and the questions hadn't shown up in twitter, I probably would have just left and never bothered to try again.

You can ask question on twitter, add a #ask hashtag to it and they'll appear on beepl.

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