Ask HN: Review Clusterify.com - small coding project meetups - creators met on HN
clusterify.com
clusterify.com
On aesthetics: although I like the StackOverflow nod, I think the color scheme is a little too 'grey'. Background is grey, headers are grey, tags are grey, buttons are grey. Don't know if other HNers have the same sense.
Specific improvements:
- on the "Add Project" page, you could make the text fields a little bit bigger
- rather than picking the # of hours you think it would take for 2-3 people, why don't you use the fibonacci-like sequence used in Story Point / Planning Poker estimation. E.g., it's a scale of complexity: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 25, 50 100. See planningpoker.com. You could also consider using a 'slider' here.
- After I posted my clusterify project idea, I realized I had made a mistake in the Markdown. Can we get a preview feature? How about editing existing submissions? (I understand this is early stage :-))
- The mistake I made is that I thought that links that are on their own line should be linked automatically. I guess this isn't strict Markdown, but seems like a common enough convention in most text-to-html systems.
- Since this is code-focused, you could make google-code-prettify available for syntax highlighting (or something similar):
http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/
- The "vote up" feature should be available on the front page, rather than only being available in the right side "project control" section once you click on a project
- Speaking of, I think you should move "Project Controls" to the top of the project page. It's hard to find them on the right side.
Some "pie in the sky" new features to consider:
- Someone mentioned integration with code hosting services like Github: that could be very cool
- Having the project proposal be a Wiki rather than an original proposal with comments
- Google maps (or similar) integration to schedule meetings
I'm definitely going to keep visiting. It's a great idea. Keep it up. And if you're interested in working on a Python project, I've proposed one!
But that made me think of one other thing. When I first saw this website, I thought that you might have been focused on in-person meetups for hacking sessions. Obviously, a local meetup has limited appeal until you have a more diffuse userbase, but I still think it wouldn't be a bad idea to support 'local' clusterifies in some way. I'm going to try posting one and see what happens.
> After I posted my clusterify project idea, I realized I had made a mistake in the Markdown. Can we get a preview feature?
You can just edit the project idea -- there's a link to do that on the project page.
> The "vote up" feature should be available on the front page, rather than only being available in the right side "project control" section once you click on a project
This is by design for now -- we want people to actually read a project before voting it up.
> Google [Calendar] (or similar) integration to schedule meetings
After seeing the feedback here, supporting events & in-person meetups is something we want to do. We're thinking about the best way to support this, and should have something new for you guys before too long.
- About the colors: you're not the only one to have mentioned this. I'll experiment with lighter background etc. and see what comes out.
- The Markdown is straight from http://www.freewisdom.org/projects/python-markdown/, but I agree that in most wiki markup syntaxes I'm used to URLs being linked automatically.
- google-code-prettify looks interesting. Not sure how to integrate it with Markdown, though.
- We'll move the controls up in the sidebar. Indeed the references etc. pushed them too far to the bottom.
We think some of you will be directly interested in this, and we hope for your feedback:
Thanks to all who helped/are helping/will help us!
Unfortunately, there were a lot of hoops! I had to register. Once registered I wasn't logged in?! I confirmed my e-mail then logged in, then clicked new project. Most of this went well except for the tags, where the auto-complete broke (would show the tag I had just typed, over the textbox I'm trying to type into). That might just be a Google Chrome issue?
My $0.02: You should optimize the hell out of the new user -> adding a project loop and the new user -> joining a project loop. User accounts are stupid and antiquated. Have the add project field use the same fields that wordpress comments use (name, e-mail, optionally website). Defer dealing with misuse (hopefully defer it until you're popular!)
Go to a website, comment on it and watch your feedback be used to evolve the website... in under half an hour! There are even comment threads where PG has a <5min read-hack-deploy-announce cycle on HN itself.
Your main challenge is likely to be getting enough volume on there to keep it interesting. You might try making a dramatically more lightweight way to participate -- a simple "What would you like to build?" prompt where people can type an idea anonymously and other users can vote on the idea, comment on it, or turn it into a proposal.
In general, you need to find a much more concise way to explain how I get involved and what the benefit is than a 150 word "basic concepts" page. Probably there should be a new proposal form that I can see and fill in before registering, and that form should be designed to explain clusterify as I fill it in.
I like the idea of a proposal field with instructions. It could still be part of the registering process (it either ends up anonymous or as yours, depending of what you decide). I'll ponder on this.
Some suggestions:
Add 'in progress'/'started' as a project status. This would affect some other features as well, for example filtering the project list. But it would allow people to find new projects more efficiently.
Also add a field for 'time to finish' once the project is done.
Allow sorting or filtering projects by est. time. If I don't have more than 4 hours, I don't want to see any projects that take longer. Additionally, in the 'New Here' section: Clusterify: work on fun, small (~2hr) projects and meet other coders. '2hr projects' is not very relevant - a lot of projects listed are est. time >2 hours, and it really depends on the quality/quantity of people who join.
Do you want to explicitly specify a limit on the number of people who join? Once the limit is reached the project can move to 'In Progress' status. The project submitter can approve join requests.
As for project length, the core idea is for projects to have low time demands, and "small" can be interpreted in many ways. Maybe we should change that to "a few hours", though.
You have Clusterify as a 'completed' project at:
http://clusterify.com/projects/completed/
But not as an idea at:
http://clusterify.com/projects/proposed/
So when a project is completed, it gets pulled off the proposed page? Or you just didn't populate the proposed page w/ the Clusterify project?
Maybe projects should never 'complete', i.e. be removed from the 'proposed' page. Reason: it might be fun to be able to look at multiple implementations of the same idea.... different little groups' 1/2 hr takes on a given notion.
Eventually, maybe it turns out that the most interesting ideas are the ones that the most people bother to make an implementation of, and this could be a sorting criterion when browsing for ideas.
The first thing one does when one sees a good idea is to think about how it could be elaborated on -- that's probably the nature of a lot of the feedback you're getting here -- but if you had all those features in your initial mockup, it would be so encrusted that no one would be able to see the good idea any more.
Thanks for the comment.
Le monde est p'tit.
:)
You could come up with a semi-unique name like "codelets" ("hacklets", "hackies", "projectiles", ) for these "short coding projects". This would be a unique term specific to and identifying your site, similar to "tweets" identifying messages posted on Twitter.
I'm slightly confused about its focus, though. How is it different from those sites that list webapp ideas? Nothing is stopping me from taking one of the ideas described on this site and just doing it myself...
I guess if you have a revolutionary idea, you better keep it to yourself :P But if you have a small project that'd be useful yet not likely a huge profit maker, by sending it there you can make it an opportunity to meet other programmers.
And it's much easier to generate buzz around your project if you 2-3 trying to do so than if you're alone. That's a reason why we suggest project members describe the project on their blogs when it's done.
-Thomas Jefferson
The development time for games tends to be longer, so "a few hours" is more like "at least 2 days, if we are binge-coding".
The "few hours" suggestion is due to our original intention: to target people who are busy, yet see meeting other coders as useful (&fun, of course!).
As for the "how to make them aware" part, we'll try to find ways. If anyone has suggestions, go ahead!