Ask HN: Review my Site | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my Site

14 pointsscapegraced20 comments

An online friend and I have created a website, Uberessay.com.

We want to compile a database of excellent essays written by and for students for reference and inspiration. Each essay is copyrighted and put in a password-protected PDF, set only for viewing. Uberessay does not in any way condone cheating. We want to encourage academic honesty and integrity in students, from high school freshman to graduate students and anything in between.

Would anyone like to tell me what they think of this idea?

View on HN

I applaud you for taking on such a great cause. I have written quite a bit about academic integrity issues, and I believe more people need to be thinking about it for something to be done.

With that being said, you're assuming people are coming to the site to cheat as you say several times "This site is not for cheating." You should probably assume people come for good purposes so as not to turn them off. Your job is to provide the technology, not criticize worst case human condition scenarios.

I won't comment specifically about the design because I don't have an eye for such things. However, the name and the font ("uber") sort of confused me.

Otherwise, it seems like a cool concept. How are you differentiating yourself from Scribd?

I would like to think that we're different from Scribd by not having any monetary gain. I truly believe that open source projects and voluntary work can change so much. I really hate advertising such as Google Ads, which are there solely for making money. I want to create this because writing and education is my passion, not because I want to make a profit.

We also don't have a desire to because yet another social network.

So how are you planning to keep the site afloat? If this is something you really believe in and want people to use, you're going to have to come up with a plan to pay for the costs.

Overall, I like the design of the site. First thing I noticed was the "what is uberessay" block of text on the left column. I think the way you've written the text is a great attention getter.

The biggest issue I have with the usability of the site is navigation and scoping problems.

Front page:

I like the essay gallery but there is no title associated with it. Are these the most recently added? Today's featured? As it stands now, I did not even realize they were essays, until I clicked on one. Could have been a picture, or user profile? who knows?

Navigation:

There is no way clear signifier as to what page you are on. You have nice little triangles on hover, but not on "selected".

The top black navigation bar is fine: Top level pages. But the second red navigation is a bit unintuitive. I assumed these links were sub-links of the top black navigation sections, but they are not. The red bar seems to contain article navigation.

So Black = Main Site Navigation, Red = Article Navigation.

I guess the placement as they are now is OK, but still seems like the red bar is a sub-set of the black bar. Perhaps adding Description titles to the red bar would help "Browse Articles ->"

Scope:

Similar to the article browsing bar, I think your website has some scoping problems.

For example the right tabbed column listing about, recent esssay, recent comments, etc is part of the article browsing functionality, which is also the red nav bar's job. The right column is also global. Something that confuses me. When I am navigating to a specific article, I see that it shows up under the red nav bar. There is a CLEAR division between what is the top header part of the site, and what is the article space. But then ... within the articles flesh colored space, there's the global article browser tabs. I assume that these tabs should be article specific. In other words I expect the scope of everything on an article page to be relative to that page. Or at least that category.

I think users need to have an implicit sense of "where I am at" within your website. Ideally when I'm browsing articles, everything should be related to my article browsing task. Then clicking on an article should refine the scope; still browsing articles, but now a subset of articles, i.e the category that the article belongs to, its publisher, etc. "Other articles by this author". "other articles from this category"

You are fine with leaving the main stuff where it is, but just be clear on the scope then. Add headers to things. Also the "about us" tab does not belong on that right column, imo.

Scope!

The layout does indeed look organized though. Good job on the design. It's more a matter of being functionally organized.

As for content, I'll browse around a bit and maybe add a new comment.

Best of luck!

The site seems interesting, and from the brief glance I got I think that the design is clean and works well. But I noticed that the font for most of the subsections is really small and basically illegible. For example, the text for http://uberessay.com/about/about-uberessay/ is a whole lot smaller than the About Us text above the search bar. It seems like you have a good selection of articles though for being up such a short period.

Yes, agreed. I've got very good eyes, but the text on the sub-pages (like the about one) was too tiny for me to read. Screenshot in Firefox 3.5: http://i27.tinypic.com/ws7eip.png

Edit: they've fixed the text size now (see below) -- good work.

Also, on the about->reading page, you say, "All essays accepted and posted on this website are protected by a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License. This means that they are not yours to copy."

But isn't the whole point of CC that you are free to "copy, distribute, and transmit the work" as long as you attribute (and don't use it for business or alter it, in this case). See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

The home page/logo/etc looks really nice, but the other thing was that it took me (a computer-savvy user) ages to figure out where to actually read an essay. This is partly because the text was too small and I physically couldn't read the download link. The PDF image should definitely be clickable and link to the PDF. And perhaps even better: a big "Click here to Read PDF" at the top of each essay page.

Ah, that's better already -- somebody fixed that text size problem quickly! :-)

I apologize for the small text; while trying to change the slider at the top I accidentally changed the wrong class in the CSS. It should be back up now. I apologize for the inconvenience!

The site looks great and I think it's a great idea.

Here's one small visual bug you can fix: you suffer from the Safari PNG gamma problem (http://hsivonen.iki.fi/png-gamma/). In short, a PNG of a certain RGB color will not match up with that same RGB CSS color in Safari. The easiest solution is to use a 1px by 1px image for your background instead of specifying it as a color in CSS.

Good luck!

easiest thing is to use tweakpng (open source windows softwarer) to delete the srgb and/or gamma chunks of your png. it runs great under wine, but I don't know about good solutions under mac.

I like it but I have some concerns for you.

How will you monetize? Freemium?

How will you scale? It looks like you two are personally reading essays to approve/disapprove them but how will you scale if you're receiving 100 essays a day? To reach real scalability, I think you will need to crowd source the approval process with a karma system.

As I've commented above, I truly believe that open source projects and voluntary work can change so much. I want to create this because writing and education is my passion, not because I want to make a profit. I don't particularly like sites such as DeviantArt, which bombards you with ads and limited features with a free account. And the premium account is out of my poor college student's price range. Perhaps at some point we will need to do this, but at the moment, we're hoping for some more people to submit essays.

We aren't sure how to scale yet, though we've come up with quite a few solutions, such as adding more people to our "staff". We want the absolute best, and sometimes community opinion is not always top notch.

Ah I see you have a direct question. I'll answer that as well.

I think the idea is fine. My friend is obsessively into philosophy and dreamed up relatively the same idea: An open place to publish and share written essays.

Seems great for anyone interested, only one thing: theres no money in it.

Another very very loosely similar website is heelpress.com Check it out, you'll see that they offer an open place to publish creative works. I have no idea how they make money but one differnce is that their market is intentially bigger than yours. So if they make any significant money at all, its in large part due to the bigger market.

You're market is tiny and they surely won't be paying customers.

Yes I understand you may not want nor care to get rich off this website, but making money is about sustainability. You can't possibly do all the work yourself, indefinitely. You need money.

Great site, well designed, neat. Concept is good. But I wonder how you can/should sustain the avg readers/writer's interest to come back to your site again and again. I love Scribd's ePaper viewer, and I believe you can add that to your site as well. Providing a pdf download should be optional and should be upto the creator to let people download. Scribd viewer lets people stay on the site, and then you can throw related essays, related categories, etc outside the reading pane! Build a community around the writings. If I were a writer, and am willing to publish my writing free on your platform, (at least) I would like to create a following around my writing. Letting people download the PDFs doesn't solve much purpose.

Load was very slow with lots of requests from some cafe on haight. Other sites load fine here. Design is OK but elements that I actually interact with should attract my attention more, rather than the background. Navigation in the site is slow. Categorization of essays is limited and needs work. Blurbs about anti-cheating and copyright seem silly, that seems obviously the purpose of the site and regardless of intent will be the primary use, hopefully not in the exact words. Overall, it feels unpolished but with a lot of potential.

I like the concept of the site. Two issues though:

1) I read a couple of the featured essays and they were both pretty bad.

2) I don't think the emphasis on cheating is necessary. It just comes off as weird to be honest. Better to focus on finding really high quality stuff.

Which were really bad, if you don't mind me asking?

"The Displaced and the American" and "The Dwellers Behind, On, and Beyond the Threshold"

Even just looking at the synopsis of the first:

"This essay presents a brief consolidation of the argument of my class Race and the New Republic – that the American culture, notably of the antebellum period, rests on the trauma of displacement and that Americans have coped with it in a divisive, self-destructive way. My essay explores the use of this concept in Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick, classic American novels that attempt to symbolically depict, if not reconcile, this division of the American social landscape."

This is barely even coherent.

I think that is a little harsh. It is coherent -- not particularly well written, but coherent.

(It is clear that the author has internalized the currently fashionable pomo academic style and is trying to reproduce it. This is, sadly, the only writing skill taught at many colleges. You won't learn to avoid self-reference in an essay, write engaging introductions, and edit sentences for clarity in a class titled Race and the New Republic. Sadly for the student, that is probably a fairly typical class in their English department.)

>I think that is a little harsh. It is coherent -- not particularly well written, but coherent.

When you strip out all the fluff, this is what you're left with:

"American culture rests on the trauma of displacement and Americans have coped with it in a divisive, self-destructive way."

This is sloppy thinking, plain and simple. America may have a divisive culture as a result of the 'trauma of displacement' its founders experienced.

However, American culture certainly does not "rest on a trauma of displacement," whatever that means.

What's worse, if you actually read the full essay, it doesn't even support this claim at all.

Anyway, to be as direct as possible to the original submitter, based on the essays you've chosen as featured writing I think it's going to be really hard for you to be successful at this project. The graphic design of the site is great, but making the actual project work is going to require a certain aesthetic taste in writing that I just don't see here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com