Show HN: my weekend project, Quotably
quotab.ly
quotab.ly
1) It's a little hard to tell the source of the quote from just the thumbnail, unless you recognize the cover. I think there should be a title above the quote that includes Book and Author (in addition to the thumbnail of the cover)
2) It's such a cool concept, but I'd like to be able to browse by books (business books, psychology books, fiction, literature, best sellers, etc).
3) Make the page more dynamic, so you don't need to refresh the page every time you call for a new quote. This will make it much nicer/enticiing to quickly scroll through quotes. The refresh creates a bit of friction
4) Make it easier to tweet/share it out. You have a tweet/pin button in the corner, but I would integrate it into the quote box. If it's a good quote, I want to post it to other places
My first reaction: Is it really necessary to load a 2.33MB background for this? Even on a fast connection, the background-image-load stuck out like a sore thumb, clashing with the otherwise smooth operation of the site.
(I'd even argue that the background, content-wise, overpowers the quote...and that's somewhat related to its byte-size)
I recommend allowing users to pick from a set of categories to filter quotes from genres they want to highlight/ignore. For instance, I would be interested in seeing highlighted passages from fiction novels without running into a bunch of self-help or religious passages.
As a further step, this would be a perfect implementation of social media advertisements. The most popular passages serve as a good advertisement for books. If you have a little widget that shows a random book and favourited passage, with the ability to cycle through to others, any website could host this interactive advertisement and see a portion of revenues from the amazon kindle purchases.
Keep it up, you're on to something here.
It already has one, it seems.
^ excellent tag line. Explains exactly what I'm looking at. Good job. Nice idea.
1. Use of arrow keys to navigate between the quotes will deliver a much better experience to the users. 2. Providing the users with a filter to browse books by different categories, authors etc. will prove to be a better discovery platform. 3. Use AJAX to load the quotes instead of reloading the page every-time.
I'd also humbly offer two enhancements: 1) Create widgets that other sites can place on their own web sites, linking back to yours. 2) New daily quotes could be published via RSS. (For example, I don't see myself visiting the site more than the initial one, but I can imagine someone putting an RSS feed into his daily reader to spice it up.)
Good luck.
I was a little disheartened to see so many religious quotes, the same book (persuit of god) came up three times, and there were others too, I'd say half of them were religious.
I think the idea is great, but the content would be better if the quotes were from fiction rather than self-help and faith based books.
There's religious fiction too. Though perhaps a tagging system would help you filter out what you don't want to see.
The image doesn't have to be shown; the bookmarklet/share button could probably detect a `display: hidden` image instead. Although that would add to the bandwidth footprint.
To my eye (and my personal taste), the book image should be valign=top. With the longer quotes, the book image at the middle looks strange.
Also, again with the longer quotes, the blue links are difficult to read on that dark/grassy field background. The grey "from" is basically illegible.
I'm using Chrome 22.0.1229.94 m.
Great work, though!
Think about it: you said you scraped the data, so it's not like it's going to be constantly updated - when it changes, it will all change at once and you can update the versions of your data files. And there's only a fairly small amount of data, especially compared to the size of your css and background images (1000 short quotes with title/author/image/url will be well under 500kB, and the compression ratio will be much better than images).
(hmm, 500kB might actually be too big - perhaps have 10 separate .js files with 100 quotes each, and download a new block when needed? If you shuffle the order of the blocks and then within each block, it will appear "random enough" to users)
So, far less server load, and much faster for the user too. Makes the forward/back problem someone mentioned much easier to solve too - the browser can remember everything itself, and you don't need to track anything server-side.
Having said that, did you begin your project with the end in mind. Who is your paying customer(target market) and what is your revenue model?
I think it's easier to make money from something popular that fills a massive maslow-style need. IMHO
I don't know how the associate program works, but I clicked through to a number of books. It won't make him rich, but it might make him a few dollars a month.
Maybe a grooveshark or youtube-like playlist would work.
Also, is there a way of displaying how many highlights a quote has received, and from whom/when?
The thumbnail is wrong.