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Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to juanplusjuan for submitting!

I'm the lead engineer at Cafe, so if you spot any issues please do let me know.

(Also, if you want to help build top-tier tools for writers like Deb to publish online, we're hiring: http://cafe.com/careers)

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The pull quotes are annoying.

> The pull quotes are annoying.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm actually personally sympathetic to that viewpoint, but our writers like using them to break up stories.

Would it be helpful if they weren't full width?

This has long been a pet peeve of mine when it comes to online articles. I see the appeal for printed magazines because, if people are flipping pages, a large pull quote might catch their attention and get them to start reading. But for an online article, the fact that I'm scrolling down means that I am reading. And if I'm reading, there's nothing more annoying than re-reading the exact sentence that I just read.

If you want to do more intelligent pull quotes, paraphrase the quotes and use them as headings. For example:

   ... And then, Reader, I clicked on it.

   <div class="pullquote">The Container Store is my kind of porn</div>

   I'd been looking for a new job for months, the search wasn't going
   as well as I'd planned, and The Container Store, let's be honest, 
   is my kind of porn. ...

This has the advantage of piquing someone's curiosity ("Why is the Container Store a kind of porn for this person?") and they can carry on to read the following paragraph to find out why. For the next pull quote:

   <div class="pullquote">A job with benefits is a unicorn</div>

Of course, it too appears above the paragraph that mentions it. The point is to set the stage for what you're about to read, not just regurgitate in a large, bold font the text you just read... which wastes peoples' time.

Images instead? Although peppering of stories with boring stock photos isn't great either. Original art is of course expensive, but that would be best.

I'm already reading the page. I don't need a pull quote to repeat what I just read. Pull quotes are for magazine layouts when you're flipping through pages. Pull quotes on a web article is a clear sign that the editor is stuck in print media. I'm not 'flipping' through web pages like a magazine, so their usage is a bit passé. Perhaps let's not listen to what the writers like and listen to what readers like. I'm pretty sure the designers aren't making grammar suggestions to the writers, so let's let the designers focus on what they know best: readability and usability.

There has to be a better way, its really distracting and breaks up all the flow. The article font is already large enough make the page scroll forever, to add large chunks of quotes or images in the made me give up halfway though.

If they must be there, a smaller font size would be better. At first glance I ignored them completely, because they looked like ads.

Putting them inline with the story is bad. Doing so in a way that just repeats the preceding paragraph is terrible. Seriously, read it for yourself all the way through and ask yourself if that's a comfortable flow.

Just read up on the benefits for the lead engineer.

"We offer a great startup work environment with free beer, snacks, and friendly teammates."

Free beer, really? I have an image of fridge in the office kitchenette where it is stocked up with beer. How common is this for a US company?

> Free beer, really? I have an image of fridge in the office kitchenette where it is stocked up with beer. How common is this for a US company?

It's pretty common for tech startups. We take requests for what everyone wants ordered from FreshDirect each week (including beer & snacks).

I work at a very large software company, and we also have beer in the fridge pretty often. Usually ends up coming out Friday afternoons when people are starting to wind down.

Most of that page is just white, blank, empty nothingness on the sides. Not all of us are reading this page on tiny, or mobile screens where the small paragraph width fills the screen. One can only dream, I suppose.

Thanks for the feedback. Generally at line widths greater than 800px or so, it's harder to read (you'll rarely find a site with more than that).

We are looking at ways of better taking advantage of the margins on desktop though.

I find this funny. http://i.imgur.com/YkzUmLq.png

OSX 10.10, up-to date Chrome (stable channel).

Haha, thanks! That obviously isn't right (clearly our careers page needs a little love).

How is Cafe different from Medium? It looks identical.

For one thing, all our writers are paid. (We believe that great writing should be valued.)

We're also trying to do a better job of driving targeted traffic to articles on our site. Since Medium accepts virtually all content, they can't make the smart investments in promotion and marketing that we're making. (We're also building some sophisticated technology for modeling these audiences across the web.)

Also, we offer editing services to all our writers. Hopefully this manifests in higher quality writing.

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