Crowdsource HN: Resources for making your next website. | Hacker News Reader

Crowdsource HN: Resources for making your next website.

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116 pointsEGreg28 comments

If I could ask a favor of folks compiling such documents: Please post these to a Wiki. Wiki-like interfaces are far more readable than 'shared' documents. Wikis are also inherently designed for collaboration with complete history (thus automatically working around vandalism).

Edited to complete a sentence.

I agree. Wikis are a much better choice for this type of thing. They can also take a bit of time and effort to maintain against vandalism.

I recently picked up http://startuptacklebox.com to start collecting this kind of information on a blog. I've started to realize that a) I don't have as much time as I thought I did to research and summarize regularly, and b) a WordPress blog might not be the best option for collecting this information together.

If anyone would like to talk about building a persistent repository of startup-related advice and tools, drop me a line at jon@startuptacklebox.com.

Very. Email sent.

same!

And wasn't there just a posting the other day for GitHub's new easy-to-setup wiki software?

I have to agree that Google Docs is not the appropriate means to getting your point across and allowing people to edit your ideas. It just never seems to work out well. Love the idea though!

There are a couple of wikis already up. At the risk of showing people a project I'm not ready to launch yet, here's a list of general libraries of information (a meta-wiki of wikis):

http://christopherliu.net/startup-wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Encyclop...

What a cool idea. It would be a great community service if clusters of experts on HN occasionally got together at a planned time to collaborate on howto docs for various domains.

thank you :)

Does anyone else hate unknowingly clicking on Google docs links?

Why is that?

Personally I find them slow, low in quality and poorly designed for smaller screens. Like one of the other comments here mentioned, I would much prefer a wiki or a GitHub gist.

Being always logged into gmail, clicking on a Google doc auto-adds your google account to the list of viewers (for everyone else to see) and also clutters up your personal Google docs listing by adding any doc you've viewed.

It doesn't add your name to a list anymore. Not for months.

Hey, the mention of "Symphony" for PHP - is that symfony (http://www.symfony-project.org/) or really Symphony (http://symphony-cms.com/)? They both look kinda cool.

I was able to disambiguate Django really easily, though, fwiw.

Oop, that was me. It's symfony. Fixed in the docs.

What's the license of the document?

It's licensed under MIT X11 license to anyone to do with as they wish.

I good thing I found recently is PageLime CMS.

Basically you tag some of your static-page divs as 'editable' and then give PageLime your FTP login. Users can then use the PageLime site to edit text and image content. The results are uploaded to your server. It has a very nice UI. Haven't tried it but I plan to use the free plan for a small site soon.

Saves you installing any CMS, mySQL etc in your hosting service.

Great initiative! Love it. I wished to add a thing or two about conversion rate optimization and A/B testing but it looks like document is not editable. Perhaps Wiki will be a better platform.

This is a slight divergence, but do people actually find Kuler useful (it's listed there which is why I'm reminded of it)?

In the spirit of collaboration, let's see if we can make a good resource! I personally need this because I will have to make a site for our company's iPhone applications.

I feel there are two fundamentally different types of website -- one to promote a product, the other is about being a community in itself. They have different goals and different visual designs.

There are some designs I really like, such as gist.com ... so I put them up there. Do you know any great examples of effective product website designs? What about social website designs? What do they get right?

Don't say it here, put it in the doc, please! We could all use it.

What about personal landing pages, where do they fit in?

The document is read-only at the moment so maybe someone can add this later (I will forget) - friend of mine yesterday raved about this PSD to XHTML service:

http://www.codemyconcept.com/

I've tried a few alternatives in the past with mixed results. Used one service that was great and then ramped up their price later, another that took too long, and another that used a layout framework with which we weren't familiar.

I can vouch for them. Great results and support!

You like gist.com so much you added it to the page twice! Even where it doesn't make sense. EGreg, you wouldn't happen to be Greg Meyer of Gist.com, would you? https://gist.com/greg

I hate to accuse you of surreptitious self-promotion.

Nah I am not that guy.

I just like gist because of the product and I like the site. But what I would really like is more examples of site LIKE that, with large spaces across the top and calls to action. Steven bao makes pretty nice use of that design. Maybe I should put wufoo.com there

Wow. This is actually great concept. A document like this, with the real-world knowledge and expertise we have here at HN? That would be one hell of a resource.

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