I got tired of reading about building websites. So, I built this. attempts+=1 | Hacker News Reader

I got tired of reading about building websites. So, I built this. attempts+=1

crowdhatting.com

17 pointsjastr17 comments

Really cool concept, huge kudos for going through and actually making it :)

That said, there's a big, big blunder on the UX side: there is absolutely no feedback. The cursor has to change when you hover the clickable elements, it's the expected behaviour of every website out there and is really disturbing that it doesn't.

Implementing some sort of feedback after clicking a link (spinner would be cool, greyed-out background maybe) is also necessary. Right now, the user has no idea what's happening (has my click being taken into account? What's happening? Who knows?) - say right there, I'm on Willy Wonka, clicked Ravenclaw, and nothing happens at all. So I reclick. Nothing happens. Might be the server working in the background, might be a bug - oh, there, it just loaded, and also voted Ravenclaw for Van Gogh because I clicked twice on Ravenclaw.

thanks for the feedback and ideas. in testing, after clicking on a house, a new celebrity would appear instantly, so there was no reason to show a waiting bar. now we can't handle the load!!! lesson learned. thanks! switching to a new box soon..

Your site is kinda slow at the moment so I'll just mention a few things.

Changing the house logos to text after a 1-2 second delay is annoying. Either it should change when you hover over it or better yet create a div that hovers over the mouse with the description instead. Having the logo change to text and then clicking that as a confirmation is weird and probably not very intuitive.

There's no way to tell whether my vote was submitted or not.

You're using Wikipedia to load the images instead of loading it on your own server. Not sure if it violates whatever Wikipedia image policies but you shouldn't be leeching images off other people's servers. That's bad form and makes your site feel slow.

Voting shouldn't be allowed until the image actually loads (again because of above, it takes forever to load). I clicked on one of the house logos and because there wasn't anything to indicate that my vote was sent I clicked it again. The application then quickly loaded the next celebrity and then skipped right to the next one because it assumed that my double click meant I was voting the same house for 2 consecutive celebrities.

Besides some interface issues. Good concept.

thanks.

changing the logo - changing to text on hover, i thought was really annoying when moving the mouse around. good idea with the div, will try that.

submitted votes - will brainstorm ideas to show you've voted

vote on image load - do you know a good way to check if the image has loaded?

thanks for the feedback

In regards to checking if an image has loaded, there is an an onload event in JS which, as the name implies, triggers upon the image loading.

Needs an "I don't know who that is" button.

Really fun though!

It didn't really work for me, but I think the concept is funny.

Sadly, I see a C&D in your future...or if SOPA is passed some jail time.

Now it's time to read about scaling websites ;)

any suggested reading!? akamai isn't within my budget at the moment...

That's actually a tough one! There are a lot of books about scalability (such as the O'Reilly ones, which I've read), but they don't really tell you what you probably need to know right now.

Mostly it's technology dependent...read up on caching, if you haven't already. Memcached or Redis can make a huge difference in performance.

If you let us know your software stack I'm sure there will be an expert to chime in and let you know the simplest hack to get things responding faster right now.

I did the same here. I learned HTML/CSS from zero (im a mechanichal engineer).

My last page using Joomla two years later: http://guali.com.mx

Congratulations, you have just reduced the distance to becoming good at this by an order of magnitude.

attempts += 1 while 1

the site is practically at a standstill now! thanks for using it.

I'll be moving it to a better machine tomorrow. Should I leave it up in the meantime (even though super slow) or put up a splash page eg. "come back soon"?

anyone have any ideas/preferences?

Better something than nothing.

Cache all the things!

What technologies did you use to make it?

mugatu, enough said. i give it a thumbs up.

after 3 hours, i'm on a new server!

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