A new way to discover high-quality content on the web | Hacker News Reader

A new way to discover high-quality content on the web

briarpat.ch

14 pointsdsowers26 comments

Nice interface! What web browsers are supported by briarpatch?

One thing I would suggest is giving the user a way to somehow collect and store the links of other users.. beyond the like button so that one can re-find those links.

As it turns out I've been looking for a streamlined way for sharing a mini-library of online resources with other people of similar interests (re: learning to code, recipes etc). This looks like a good way of doing just that!

Thanks for the feedback. A "save for later" feature is an interesting idea. I'll put that on my list.

Usability observeration:

The auto-load feature effectively makes the footer impossible to read. Perhaps move the important footer information to the top or sidebar?

Yeah, good call. I'll make that change. You can see the footer info if you go to one of the pages that doesn't have infinite scroll. But you're right. I remember being annoyed by the same thing on facebook.

I like how it just uses the functionality that's built into your browser, but the problem with browser bookmarks is that, for the "experts and leading thinkers" you want on your platform, those people usually have thousands of links on Delicious or Pinboard, and with that amount of bookmarks the browser's interface just doesn't cut it. Something to think about.

Thanks for the feedback. Do you think these experts have thousands of actual bookmarks or just thousands of links on these other platforms? Because it seems to me that people don't want to pollute their own bookmark collections, and will only bookmark something that they see as being a cut above the rest. But I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.

Well, it depends. Some people use bookmarks as favorites, and you want to keep your favorites compact so they're not messy, but other people use bookmarks as a research tool and bookmark everything they may want to refer to later, either personally or for a blogpost. Same reason people favorite tweets: not because they're oh-so-special, but because they want to keep them around. I have about ~350 links tagged journalism on Delicious, and I consider all of those to be a cut above the rest.

Agreed. I'm not sure what this gets me that http://pinboard.in/popular/ doesn't already provide.

What briarpatch does differently is you don't have to use a javascript bookmarklet. With the briarpatch chrome extension, you can just bookmark sites the way you normally do and it works behind the scenes without you having to think about it.

Sorry, I meant as a "way to discover high quality content on the web".

For bookmarking: I get that briarpatch is hooking into the browser, and I see how that's interesting but I'm way into pinboard and it's ability to automatically collect and full-text index every link I put on the web (e.g. twitter, google reader, reddit, browsing, hn)

Yeah, pinboard is definitely good for collecting everything.

However, we don't want briarpatch to collect everything that someone posts on all of these sites because it would lead to content pollution (like you see with most content discovery sites these days). We want briarpatch to thoroughly limit the ways content is collected. Whether this experiment work or not remains to be seen. But thanks for your feedback!

Nice! Just signed and sent an invitation for a couple of friends.

Would it be possible to add a feed for http://briarpat.ch/hot and http://briarpat.ch/user/feed?

I think the copy above the fold should refer specifically to browser bookmarks. Initially that wasn't clear, and it seems to me that's the main differentiator here.

EDIT: I mean on the main page, of course, not the /hot that you linked here :)

Good insight. I think a lot of people have been confused about that. I will make that change. Thanks!

> We're sorry but the beta version of the briarpatch extension is only available for Google Chrome.

Looks like I won't be using it after all.

Yeah, sorry about that. This is an early beta version, and I've only built the chrome extension for it at the moment. I'm working on firefox. If you want, I can notify you when it's available?

That't be nice, yes, thank you.

Just one question about this:

> If you installed the briarpatch extension, all of your bookmarks are now in sync.

If I had been using Chrome, all my bookmarks would have been uploaded automatically? Don't you think that's a bit intrusive? Trying to be constructive here, not criticizing your system at all.

You can choose which bookmarks you want to make public as soon as you install the extension. It's also kind of nice to have all of your bookmarks in briarpatch because you will always have a backup copy of them, and won't lose them if you get a new computer, etc...

Oh that sounds ok. Thanks for clarifying.

Just to talk about naming for a second....

Isn't a Briarpatch a bad thing to be in?

Why does everybody use a blue color scheme these days?

Excellent site, but why limit invitations?

very nice interface! what UI framework did you use?

Thanks. It's kind of a custom mixture of elements. I used some bootstrap elements, and also purchased some graphics from graphicriver.

cool. what's your technology stack?

PHP/MySQL with Codeigniter. Pagodabox is hosting it (they are kind of like heroku, but for PHP)

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