Please review: Reading news Del.icio.usly | Hacker News Reader

Please review: Reading news Del.icio.usly

jaxly.com

8 pointsSingAlong8 comments

Great idea on bootstrapping user interest from del.icio.us.

I have too many del.icio.us tags. Please sort them by frequency rather than alphabet (or at least provide the option).

I use del.icio.us as a repository for technical bookmarks (as opposed to faves.com, where I put cool links for my friends). So my "language" tag refers to programming languages, but that's not what Jaxly assumes. It would work better for me if you took the whole tag cloud and tried to infer my interests from that.

I'm probably very atypical.

I noticed that too when I clicked on my tag 'code', I got all sorts of stuff like presidential code, etc

You mean doing semantics can set this right? Any suggestions on APIs to use?

And, the the action of getting tags takes place by an ajax request, so will it be heavy for the server if I perform semantic actions in the background to give user tags? I am running on appengine

UPDATE: I changed the tag visualization to a tag cloud to solve the navigation problem. But still the 'older' link problem leaves me stranged at the bottom of the page when the changes take place at the top.

UPDATE-2: I changed the tag view back to list type. The cloud type seems too crowded and not readable. Atleast the list type can list neatly by alphabetical order

UPDATE-3: Solved the view problem when selecting tags and navigating through news. It works fine now. All I had to do was to change the href=javascript:something as onclick attribute and set the href to an anchor pointing to the top of the page. But still the problem of selecting tags through the crowd, I am not able to come up with any visualization idea. Creating a tag cloud with various font sizes is not possible since I don't know the number of bookmarks in a user's account. With that data I could have done some math and set different font sizes for different tags.

I have a long stretch of tags (username: bprater), when I click on a lower one, I don't know that stuff is being changed at the top. You might take the user back to the top.

Oh yeah! I too found some difficulty when I read news and then clicked the 'older' link I was still at the bottom of the page while the news on top changed.

Will correct it in a few minutes. Thanks for reporting the bug in usability

I have so many tags. Can you not just take all the tags, see which ones I link/use the most, and then prioritize my news on that basis? Clicking tags seems like it's waste of time and is too much tunnel-vision.

Neat concept, definitely.

Same thought here. I don't see what the point of pulling in my delicious data is if you don't actually do anything with it. If that were a big help I would just open delicious up in another window and type out the tags I wanted.

"If that were a big help I would just open delicious up in another window and type out the tags I wanted."

Well, then many apps would not exist if developers thought this way.

What about Meebo or Pidgin? Why not login to GTalk, Yahoo chat and the rest in separate windows?

It becomes hard when you have to read news by tags from delicious, faves.com and every bookmarking site. (yeah adding more sites soon) :)

Users tend to forget about keywords they want to read news about. What if you have a 15 keywords to read news everyday about? I have have seen people who tend to forget to search for some info on Google when they have a list of things to search for (I am one of them too). The same thing applies to news.

Wondering how it could be made more useful?

That was a part of my entry for the Daylife developer challenge. The whole entry is http://jaxly.com which includes a news search engine and an OpenSocial app for Orkut.

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