Pineapple – Web tutorials, tools, and resources that don't suck | Hacker News Reader

Pineapple – Web tutorials, tools, and resources that don't suck

pineapple.io

184 pointsTallboyOne49 comments

Love it, I hadn't seen it yet. I've been trying to handle links to tutorials, links I find while reading tutorials, resources that might be useful later when I'm already familiar with what I'm trying to learn, and it was clumsy. Tried Delicious, Kippt etc, but a focused service is much better—and more likely to have good links from other users.

Already found some interesting tutorials and posts while searching for something I intend to start learning this month. Thank you.

Addendum: a problem I've found while trying to find good learning material is that of the unknown unknowns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns): when you're starting out, you don't know what you have to learn yet. Maybe guides that tell you what you have to learn, in what order... A way of letting the user organize tutorials that lets the user "patch" holes in their knowledge by adding other tutorials, or revisiting some tutorials... Well, this is beyond the scope of Pineapple, but it's an interesting problem to think about.

I already attempted this here with the wiki: http://pineapple.io/wiki

But the scope of that is so huge that it's kind of a daunting task, hehe. I chip away at it slowly.

I saw the image of a million bookmarks as the problem it sought to solve, which is great. So I bookmarked it.

Haha, whatever makes you happy.

My site was submitted 1 year ago, and I have since made an awful lot of updates. There will be a ton of gems on here that you will find, I assure you of that!

I like the concept, it looks quite nice.

I actually signed up, which is unusual for me.

Best of luck with it!

Thanks! I'm at the point now where I will see something simply incredible that blows my mind, I'll submit it to my own site... and it will already have been submitted like 6 months ago, and I completely missed it the first time, heh.

I've tried to make it easy to find what you're looking for (tags, search by tags as well as text, categories, wiki, etc).

I should also mention that it is quite heavily moderated, similar to HN. People sometimes don't agree with that, but you can see from the quality of HN it beats anything like reddit, because grammar and quality are important. I'm sort of the same way, but related to resources. That really helps the signal-to-noise ratio, and even though some might not like that, it's very important to me.

TallboyOne is a good curator. That makes the site worthwhile.

I've been following this site for a little while now, it's turned into a great resource for me and I've really enjoyed watching it come along. Nice job.

Thanks man, that makes my day.

Looks great. I've been kicking around a similar idea for a few years but never got around to building it.

A platform for ranking the best resources to learn anything and everything would be amazing. You could then have "verified experts" in the field help curate tracks and syllabi on top of that information that users could then follow like a regular college major plan.

I see the inclusion of paid tutorials. In the interest of your claim of only including things "that don't suck", have all of these been curated and reviewed? Does the tutorial provider give you free access to give it a proper review? Or is this just a list of tutorials, and the Reddit style votes will determine what sucks and what doesn't?

I review each link that gets submitted for quality (in addition to people voting), although you're right about paid ones, I can't always see the real details. It's fairly easy to tell when something is good quality though, even without seeing the real meat. For example, these are paid, and look very good, just based on the demo, etc: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts

I've been using this site since the OP posted it in a web design subreddit. I've found this site to be very helpful.

Nice!

Why aren't the resources tagged "ruby on rails" also tagged "rails" and "RoR"? People will try searches on various tags, not just the first tag you thought of. Maybe you allow users to tag the content, but maybe I arrive at the site just wanting to search and find what I searched for.

Thanks natch.

I feel it somewhat makes it harder to find things that way because it fragments things too much. It is tricky for some things, but it's kind of like stack overflow.. 90% of the time you're right. For the remaining 10% you can use the regular text search vs tag search.

Good point, but what ways are there to solve this problem and why solve it? Having 4 different tags for RoR show up under an item is probably not a good idea for a variety of reasons. One of the problems would that some items might be tagged with only 'RoR' and not 'Ruby on Rails' resulting in the user having to aggregate more tags to get a fulfilling search. However the point you make is valid, so it is a problem which should be looked into imo.

Maybe an implementation of an underlying thesaurus could solve this? It might however be hard to maintain it. Any other ideas for how to solve this problem?

Yes an underlying tag thesaurus would be good. Or tag synonyms as leepowers called (I think) the same idea above.

Just to state here a metric for what the end goal is, whatever method is used would ideally provide the same or a pretty similar hit list for any searches for different synonyms with the same meaning.

This is an issue that can be solved with tag synonyms. Similar to what StackOverflow does: http://stackoverflow.com/tags/synonyms

On SO "ror" and "rails" are synonyms for "ruby on rails"

That would be a great solution here imho.

A few minor things, which might be worth considering.

1. Changing from standard view to compact view clears the search.

2. Some sorting when doing 'text-based search' would also be nice.

3. What does 'All time'-sorting do? Is think it's the top rated entries, but I am not sure.

I came up with the same idea recently, only I wanted to build it around StackOverflow, but this is much, much better :D

A note: You should separate profile and favorites pages, I don't like watching my own face all the time :D It would be more useful if favorites would get more space.

Haha, right on. Thanks for adding lots of good stuff btw.

I see what you mean - in the meantime you can click the 'favorites' link at the top right (instead of your name) and that will skip the profile section, unless you have a huge monitor that is.

I see, but I think they (profile and favorites) belong to separate pages. Another suggestion: A flagging or some other solution would be nice for incorrect info (bad/missing tag, wrong description, etc.) so users could help you out marking content which needs improvement. Or like on SO, a user with enough reputation could edit tags, etc.

What forum software do you use? Did you wrote it yourself?

All of it I wrote from scratch.

And yes I agree, a flag feature has been on my mind for quite some time :)

There's also: http://www.agiledesigners.com/

And my own http://thetoolbox.cc (although it's not really being kept up to date at the moment)

Are the tags user created? One thing I've learned through experience is user created tags are almost universally useless (this is especially true when the service gets popular, and people start adding completely false tags to content, in hopes of garnering more attention).

They're not entirely user created. You need a certain score to add new tags, and by that point you have gotten the feel of Pineapple where I'd trust that user to add new tags. I also moderate all new ones that are added, and update tags for all new resources added. I also delete redundant tags, etc.

Nice site. I think the only thing that I would like to see is the name of the site as well as the page title, so that I can see if there are multiple tutorials from the same site. Thanks for the collection, I'll be sure to use it when searching for learning material.

Awesome work! I'll start adding some links that I've been saving for myself.

I really like this idea. In a way, it is like a wiki, but tubular and tagged.

How did you come up with the name Pineapple? it gives off such a nice aura.

A lot of sleepless nights... :)

It took me 3 months to pick a name, then it hit me and I said yes, that is so perfect.

I love the concept. It's like a reddit for tutorials.

When I search for c#, the first three results have nothing to do with c#. I think it's searching for "c" internally.

Ah interesting, I will look into that. In the meantime you could use tags:

http://pineapple.io/tags/c-sharp

Very neat concept, glad to see it moving along well. Do you have any plans or ideas on monetization or is it just a hobby for you?

At the moment it is a hobby. It gets quite a lot of traffic, but I'm more interested in providing a really solid resource for people rather than making a few bucks off ads and taking away from that experience.

I was thinking about offering paid tutorials however, recorded how I would want to see them (more live coding, and more complex topics. Also more start-to-finish projects).

I think by default it should sort by "all time" instead of "what's hot". But that's just me.

Ironically I added this to my sea of bookmarks =(

Haha, that gave me a good laugh :)

I need one more vote to hit a magical 100 :]

I love pineapple. dude your a genius!

BTW, the tag cloud at the bottom of the page is unclickable...clicking on a tag name doesn't do anything.

Hmm, where exactly? Everything seems to work right, unless I'm missing something.

The very bottom, where the headline reads:

Lots of Topics The amount of resources on Pineapple is growing every day. If you don't choose to participate, at least check back often and browse, that's okay too!

I guess that tag cloud is actually an image file...can't it just be a repeat of the sidebar-cloud, for convenience? If not, I guess I had expected either the image or the headline to be clickable and take me to a categories listing.

(this is on Chrome, Mac OS X)

Oh right, yes that's an image for this link:

http://pineapple.io/tags/all

That is a good point though, I'll add that in.

the jiggling logo is annoying...

I find it the opposite :)

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