Show HN: Please review http://GetLocalNe.ws | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Please review http://GetLocalNe.ws

7 pointssagacity9 comments

Originally begun as a sort of 'weekend' project, it has been a bit of a struggle, but finally I think we've brought it to a state where I can request reviews, feedback etc.:

http://GetLocalNe.ws

Please feel free to report bugs/problems or post feedback/suggestions on any aspect of it.

Geolocation accuracy (or inaccuracy) reports will be highly appreciated.

Quality of data is being rigorously assessed now, but the current data should be at least reasonably okay. Please let me know otherwise.

Work on identifying and integrating XML/RSS feeds from news sources is on now and this will be implemented in phase-II, within a week or so.

Identification and addition of new news sources is also being carried out now. You can help (greatly) by suggesting additional news sources known to you using the 'Suggest a News Source' link.

Please feel free to post feedback at the site Guestbook too.

Over to you now:

http://GetLocalNe.ws

Nicely done, I like the minimalistic/simple look.

I'm not sure who the target audience is: if I'm living somewhere, I probably know about the local news sources, and if I'm in a shorter visit, I probably don't care (or if it's in a foreign country, I might not know the language).

One suggestion: add the posibility to suggest modification of the source data. Eg. a few of my local sources have missing diacritics. I'd love to contribute that small fix back, but can't.

This way you can also allow your readers to notify you of bad/broken links (ok, you can handle that if you're going to get the rss feeds) or anything else that may happen over time, so you don't need to worry about it, just look it up if reported.

Also, thank you for not requiring my exact location to be able to suggest (correctly) where I am. I'm annoyed by how many sites litely want to know my location just so they can "improve my browsing experience".

> Nicely done, I like the minimalistic/simple look.

Thanks. It boosts our confidence a bit; we're not the only ones who like the design theme. :)

> I'm not sure who the target audience is:

You're spot on, based on what is available at the site now. However, as I mentioned in the post, we are working on integrating XML/RSS feeds for as many locations, from as many sources as we can. We hope once this is in place, it'll provide at least a minimum value for a larger mass to visit their local page daily/frequently. What do you think?

> add the posibility to suggest modification of the source data.

Has been on our to-do list already :-) This feature should go live in a few hours from now.

Thanks again for your detailed and highly valuable feedback.

I find your site very useful actually.I would also like to see some data on homepage, for example maybe some random news sources to show up like twitter's Trending Topics (it would be great if they are not just random but maybe most popular or something) just to make me more interested in exploring and to show me some activity on website. Nice job with current data, it looks ok not just for US but also for countries in Europe what i find really useful.

Thanks for the feedback. We're already working on making the home page at least somewhat more 'engaging' and 'live' - thanks again for the suggestion.

I'm in Padova, Italy, but it reported me as being in Ancona, which is fairly far away, and not by any means the closest major city.

(Replying to davidw to keep all the geolocation reports in order)

I am in Amsterdam, Netherlands, but the site listed my location as Aalsmeer - given this is the first item in the list (as is Ancona for Italy), I think the geo lookup works at the country level, but not at the city level.

It pinged me correctly. Funny, the only newspaper I surfed to was for Ancona, Italy, which is near a place I used to live. Worked well!

Thanks for all the feedback everybody.

I'll post individual replies too a little later.

Clickable:

http://GetLocalNe.ws

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