Ask HN: bikechatter.com - review & suggestions | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: bikechatter.com - review & suggestions

8 pointsdavidw20 comments

Looking for suggestions for this site I whipped up to play around with twitter some, and to unclog my main twitter page of all the cyclists I was following.

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Not sure this is the best way to unclog the twitter feed. Something like a group in Tweetdeck would work really well to solve that problem.

Though, maybe you can do some neat things with this idea.

First thing that is apparent to me is that there is too much noise. This needs to be reduced in order for me to read this feed. Maybe an up vote system (HN, reddit, etc) to stress important tweets. You could also stress the important tweets with some other metric (number of replies, number of followers, etc).

Second thing that is apparent is that I don't know who half of these cyclists are. I need to know why I am reading x person's tweets. You could expand the bio pages to include more information on the each cyclist (full name, team, rankings, wikipedia link, etc). Also, I want a list of the cyclists that are being tracked.

Thanks, those are good suggestions.

I don't really care about 'unclogging twitter' - that's for someone else to deal with, I just wanted to provide a nice group of cycling feeds, grouped together.

Voting for interesting messages is a good idea, as is adding some information in order to give some information about riders who are not Lance Armstrong and thus relatively obscure.

The rider list is the only missing feature that I had expected to find.

Seems that there are two areas to cover: who's on Twitter and what are they saying. As for who, definitely add more information but consider grouping the riders for context (by nationality, team, specialty, recent/upcoming races, etc.). Consider adding a text box to suggest another rider.

And as for what they're saying, a sort of "mute" button would be nice; Burke Swindlehurst is funny but a little too prolific. Perhaps allow the posts to be grouped by rider. That way Dave Z fans won't miss his infrequent posts, such as "Raced through a town called Bonar today..."

Ok, I added the complete list. I think working on some categorization/user ratings sounds good too. Thanks!

Here's the clickable link:

http://www.bikechatter.com

I'm looking for ideas of fun/cool things to do with it to make it more interesting.

Erm I'm sorry but... What is it?

Is it just a live search of twitter for some term?

It's a collection of professional bike racers on twitter. I guess most technical people could follow them all, but not everyone wants to do that, and not everyone wants to track down new ones, and not everyone is "technical people" either.

It's definitely not aimed at a general audience - if you don't know who Ivan Basso and Cadel Evans are (on the front page right now), it's not for you. But maybe you have some fun ideas just the same:-)

OK... As a huge cycling fan I love the idea of this site. I could follow these guys on Twitter but I like the idea of taking a 2 minute break and just skimming this site instead.

Some suggestions:

1 - Spend time on making a more cycling oriented design 2 - Add thumbnails of the cyclists pictures next to their comments and maybe link to a bio page

I wouldn't put all those messages up there with my own copyright notice. Besides that, I only see profile pics next to a few cyclists, so that could use a fix. Seems like this could be useful to someone in that community--maybe try pulling out trends, the way Twitter does across the whole service.

Good point - fixed.

i'm not sure what more you can do, but a good start would be to clean it up. the layout is broken for me.

The layout is broken for me as well (Safari 4).

meh...yeah it's broken (chrome)

Hearing that really made me lose it. I am so f'ing sick of HTML and CSS not working properly from one browser to the next... and the damn thing is pretty simple, and uses a CSS "framework" (blueprint) to boot. It works fine in FF and Konqueror.

Thanks for letting me know, though:-(

you don't fully use blueprint though, which is whats causing the problem :p

#statusnav's parent is a blueprint block, but its breaking for me in the transition from #statusnav's parent div to the #stati table, which isn't blueprinted.

The table should just be contained, though, right? I guess not. That seems to fix it. Don't understand why it's completely broken in one place and works fine in another, and of course it's frustrating to not even be able to test these things easily across different systems. Thanks again for the tip.

if you're going to use blueprint or any css framework, you need to use it 100%. or as much of 100% as you can. otherwise, it won't be able to do its own job.

and, yeah, such is the life of the web developer/designer. i have 12 browsers installed on my windows box.

> such is the life of the web developer/designer

The thing that drives me nuts is that it has been the life of the web developer since I started doing this in 1997. I'm sick of things working in one place and not in another.

As has already been stated, your layout needs work. Looks like you've got a table (gasp!) that is not clearing the floated status bar content or something.

The layout is extremely simple, I think you are overcomplicating it by using a "blueprint". It's just a bunch of content the flows linearly down the page, no need for floats or anything fancy.

good start, not displaying correctly in Safari on XP. I do follow cycling though so I do see some value in the site itself once things get worked out.

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