Show HN: Git News – Social News website for developers and GitHub fans | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Git News – Social News website for developers and GitHub fans

gitnews.tech

117 pointsnimit9558 comments

Advice (take it or leave it): I think the item titles should be real hyperlinks (not js actions), so when right clicking the user gets the option to open in new tab.

I usually open links in new tabs while browsing a site. Especially an aggregator site like HN, reddit or gitnews. I always use the mouse wheel to open them. When a site doesn't allow that I already feel a lot less inclined to use it.

Same (except I often use shift+f in Pentadactyl or three fingers on trackpads, and middle click emulation when pressing both buttons is an option on two-button rats).

+1 on this.

To the author: It looks like your site is using next.js. You can use the `Link` component for this purpose: https://nextjs.org/docs/api-reference/next/link

Okay will include this.

This is fixed. Thanks for the input :)

Is it for git fans or Microsoft GitHub fans?

I know there might not be a distinction for a lot of people, but the name and the headline makes it ambiguous, at least to me.

Maybe add an "About" page outlining what it's meant for?

Most of the headlines I see right now aren't about git, which is what I would guess something called "Git News" was :-)

Good luck!

Yeah I know. :P

Plan to extend to gitlab, bitbucket as well :)

And sourcehut! https://sr.ht/projects

I concur. I also wouldn't consider the idea of online social repo systems to be synonymous with git.

Git is a source control tool, "Git news" would suggest to me either news about the development of git or a news platform somehow operated through git.

This next opinion might be more controversial, but I think it needs to be said: the conflation of git with github is exactly what Microsoft wants because it leads young developers towards github and a sleak online experience. This hurts the open source ecosystem by creating a single stop shop with little competition. And it might not be easy to switch to other alternatives because of lockin due to external features like issues and wiki, inertia, etc.

Calling this site "Git News" is a small part of this development, and that is imo unfortunate.

I really like the idea of this, both as a means to discover new projects, and to learn more about plans/roadmaps/updates for projects I already know about.

A couple of suggestions, if I may:

- Tags: assuming the amount of content grows, it's going to be difficult to sort things that interest me from things that don't. Tags (like StackOverflow uses them) would let me filter to languages/concepts that interest me

- RSS feed: I consume a lot of blogs using RSS, and it would be my preferred method for a news site like this too. Ideally it would work with the tags feature above

I like the idea of adding RSS support (to LibHunt); however, what do you imagine being syndicated in a topic? All recently mentioned projects?

Edit: OK, I will add RSS support per programming language. So every time a new projects gets into the top mentioned projects it will be syndicated.

Thanks. Yeah I like the RSS idea it is on my roadmap.

By tags you mean the github tags rights? Or people can add the tags themselves ?

I was thinking that users would be able to add tags to each post, from a curated list of tags (StackOverflow-style), but if it's a GitHub project being posted, it would be useful to default to any tags that project has (Still allowing the user to change them tho)

I quite admire anyone who's willing to take on the challenge of creating a website with user generated content these days. That is a box even Pandora would hesitate to open.

Also, it seems a bit odd that a site that claims to be for 'GitHub fans' doesn't use Github's OAuth provider for account creation...

Thanks a lot. I was planning to add Github's OAuth today.

For the "visit project" link, it messes up the format on mobile. I'd suggest just using the icon and dropping the text on small screens, and possibly moving it from the bottom of the card to the top right.

> a bit odd that a site that claims to be for 'GitHub fans' doesn't use Github's OAuth provider for account creation

I think the idea of an MVP is to create something that works, not something with all the bells and whistles

If the idea is to make an MVP then GitHub auth would have been less work. Creating a registration and login system is far more work than implementing a basic OAuth flow, especially if you can use something like Auth0.

> Creating a registration and login system is far more work than implementing a basic OAuth flow

If you're using Rails it's just one gem and some bootstrap signup forms. I guess it also depends on the experience and skills of the developer.

Check out what I was doing with http://gitspo.com/. Might give some inspiration. It is an aggregator of all mentions of open-source projects.

That's interesting, I've built a similar service, too - https://www.libhunt.com. You can see all the trending repos that people are sharing on HackerNews and Reddit. Also, if you click on any of the repos, you can see the exact mentions + alternatives.

There’s so much space for icons and borders, you had to abbreviate the titles even (viewed on mobile device). I prefer HN’s style.

Have made some tweaks. You like it better?

Better :) I see 3-4 items per page now. More is better. Don’t really care about stars or forkcount. “Visit page” has a linebreak when the dev’s name is longer. And there’s a column of white background on the right into which layout is overflowing (Firefox on iOS)

btw, the project I've mentioned bellow (LibHunt) is HN's style. I've built it with HN usability in mind (plain, simple, easy).

My fat fingers wish HN has more space around each HTML element lol

After toying round with the CSS for a couple minutes, I was very happy with these two simple style changes:

    .chakra-button {
      height: 1.25rem;
    }
    
    .chakra-heading {
      font-size: 1rem;
    }

I definitely suggest adding a guidelines page, like you'd find on HN[0] and subreddits. Without one, it's not entirely clear to me what this site is for other than git. And if this takes off, you'll want some rules to fall back on when moderating posts and comments.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Guidelines page is up now :)

Heads up - generally "Git" cannot form part of a product name. https://git-scm.com/about/trademark

(GitHub and others were accepted for historical reasons)

Will dig into this. Thanks for the heads up.

I love this idea and also the way it's designed, it still feels like a kind of brutalism, but just a touch more modern. I don't really know how to explain it but something about the design appeals very much to me!

https://git.news

No involvement of the community

You mean the site has a comment feature? I was more referring to the naming. Also why do I get down-voted for naming other similar sites? To me that is a relevant piece of information.

I agree. Also, that site is clearly influenced by the "community" because it's based on what repos are trending! :-)

Yeah, I meant the commenting :) Naming is coincidentally similar :P

Neat site. Thanks for sharing! There’s an endless list of cool ideas being worked on. Searching through it all can be done in so many ways.

Thanks.

Hmmm, kind of misleading name. This isn't "git" news. It's miscellaneous software projects.

If you want actual git news, checkout https://git.github.io/rev_news/

Is it also a repo we can pull for updates?

Not yet.

I love the color theme! Nice job.

One bit of feedback: the upvote and downvote buttons felt laggy to me. The on hover effect doesn't always activate, and after I click it, I don't get any immediate feedback that it worked. I'm on a satellite internet connection with a lot of latency, so I'm assuming I'm waiting for network requests to finish.

macOS / FireFox 84.0.2 (64-bit)

A link aggregator that only accepts GitHub links is a great idea, though I agree with other posters that it would help to add support for other Git hosts.

Feature request: comment replies. As far as I can tell, comments don't allow replies, which makes it more-or-less impossible to have any kind of conversation about a comment.

Please implement github sso. Lot of people are on mobile and hate filling out even a single input field.

Yes implementing it shortly!

Seems like the responsiveness needs to be worked on a bit more[0]. Otherwise very cool project, I kinda like the color used for the dark theme.

0: https://imgur.com/a/uUemQQd

Thanks. Makes sense, didn't test for long title, limit the heading in mobile?

I'd recommend not doing that as it makes the UX on mobile worse and has a bad influence on SEO. Instead, I usually do something like that:

    h1::first-line {font-size:2rem;}
    h1 {font-size:1.5rem;}

It will show the first line of a heading in a larger and all further lines in a smaller font size. Additionally, you could hyphenate headings.

edit: And fluid typography might be something to look into. Currently, you seem to have a single breakpoint where font size is adapted. That does not work well on larger phones.

Did not think though responsiveness a lot. Is kind of MVP. Though have made some tweaks for mobile view now.

Fixed by fixing the length for now.

It's a good start. I shall watch this space with great interest.

Thanks!

Have added github login

i follow almost everyone who puts a like on my stuff on github; then every project they like appears on my github timeline in return. I see a lot of cool stuff, but frankly, I don't have the time to follow up on all these leads. there is so much fragmentation in the oss world (speaking as someone who worked in different domains and programming languages) It's as if there are different tribes who all live in their very own bubble.

middle click broken and the sizing on the desktop is for blind people

nevermind, the contents of the primary links are completely uninteresting anyway

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