komlenic

While I agree with the simple goal and spirit of this, it is irresponsible to not provide authorization when it would be trivial to implement. I wonder if the author would be so nonchalant about it if someone posted damaging comments using his name (and photo) over a few hundred blogs?

Under-promise and over-deliver.

Never attribute to malice, that which can be attributed to ________.

Your true friends are those who care how your life turns out.

Genuinely asking someone "How does that make you feel?" or "How do you feel about X?" will make you instantly likable, diffuse almost any tension, defensiveness, or aggression, and is always appropriate when you don't know what to say.

First impression: pretty good, I instantly knew what was going on and signing up worked exactly as expected and was painless.

The /users/view/ pages are not nearly as good or visually pleasing as the /projects/view/ pages. As a user I want someone landing on "my" page to be impressed, not be presented with a rather boring page of text. Screenshots for each project worked on, maybe moving the user's photo over in the left pane, etc may help here.

What would you say if I saw http://www.whosofftoday.com/ and built essentially a clone at http://www.timeoffscheduler.com/ ?

I'm sure I'd end up doing many little things differently than you, and maybe even a few bigger things, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this example.

I loved Reader for a while, but have since moved away from it in favor of twitter: Reader is like a dam that keeps backing up... every time you log in you see this unread count and the implication is that you need to "catch up" and skim everything. On the other hand, twitter is a flowing river and if I miss a day, it's gone without guilt. Reader is still great for those sources you just never want to miss though.

RSS isn't "dying", though RSS readers are probably "languishing".

It is both: if you find yourself abandoning systems after 3 weeks, then something about the way the system fits you is wrong. Perhaps it's too complex. Maybe it isn't flexible enough. Maybe it inherently creates too much guilt so you get frustrated and give up.

It may help to think of the number one goal of a todo list as a place to get onto paper (or bytes, whatever) all the things you have in your head that you think you need to do, NOT as something which will help you get more done. The primary benefit is to remove your anxiety about having to remember everything you need to do. Once it's all out of your head and in one place, you can easily determine what it is you need to be doing right now, and forget everything else.

Complicated GTD or todo systems just bog you down and take too much fiddling and constant review/maintenance. I use two lists: a "dump" list where I put anything/everything that I need/want to do, and an "action" list where I move a few things from the dump that I'm going to focus on for the day or very immediate future. It's a simple matter to go through the dump and pick out the highest priorities and move them to action.

If you're struggling, I'd advocate trying something simple like this and forgetting more complicated systems. Google Tasks is perfect for something like this.

I think your response hits at the intent of my question. It is widely held that "execution matters more than idea", but I personally get tripped up by feeling like something has to come from my own light-bulb epiphany to be authentic or ethical. Clearly this is wrong.

Is this model of scenarios more or less correct?:

1 copy a mousetrap design: bad ------- ethical/unethical line ------- 2 build your own mousetrap (even if there's really nothing "new" about it), but market it better or present it differently: pretty good 3 build a better mousetrap: really good 4 invent a whole new way to trap mice: awesome, not likely

2 and 3 are probably where the majority of successful business ventures fall. Most 4's probably started as 2 or 3.

I passed, but had to resist the temptation to nab the background image, straighten the horizon, and email it off to the dev.

Good concise advice, and that's certainly a baseline. In my case I am speaking (asking) more about replicating functionality or an idea, which is a lot more difficult to know where to draw a line on.

Great idea with a lot of potential.

I'd strongly consider a complete from-the-ground up rethink of the new-user flow. This may sound harsh, but I'd argue that as the site exists now there is no clear new-user flow. There's no concise path through what's being presented.

If you're stuck, a good exercise is to go grab 5 people and show them the site. Don't explain anything. See what they do. See if they get it. See if they interact with it the way you expect a new, fresh potential user to. (In effect this is what you did by posting to HN, and we're probably a big chunk of your target.)

To be honest, I didn't even try the service because I'm not sure what to do/click:

1. There's no clear call to action other than the red "create your page now" button, which I'm not going to click if it requires an email address/website, when I don't understand what I'm signing up for yet. "View a sample page", "see demo", might be better.

2. The most prominent thing that jumps off the page visually is "$9/mo". I think I understand that you're selling a value-added service (which is good), but why don't you hook me on trying the service for free, or pitch me a great demo before showing me dollar signs? Seeing the value-added pitch at the top and in prominent color, before I understand the service is a clear path to my browser's back button.

3. "try it free for a few days with no obligation" isn't comforting. What happens after a few days? Is the basic "here's a pretty landing page for your soon-to-be-built site" a free service indefinitely? It's just not clear.

It's as if you need to step back and consider what one simple goal is most important to you for a new user landing on this site, and then strip away everything that doesn't directly support that. To paraphrase some quote: "perfection isn't achieved by adding, it's achieved when there's nothing left to take away."

I hope the comments here will prove helpful (and not too harsh), and again, great idea. Good luck with it.

@angrydeveloper:developers::@clientsfh:designers

Sure: the animation speed itself wasn't very smooth... probably more of an opinion, but the feeling was like "yeah yeah, this is going to require too much effort to watch/grok". It was a tl;dr moment, right when you had me ripe to learn more or be directed elsewhere.

And the circular tick marks above the house just scream "something's loading" as they are just too similar visually to every throbber/ajax wait symbol users are used to seeing. Hope that helps!

Looks interesting, trying it out now (waiting for the report). Just some quick thoughts: On the "please enjoy our animated story of social media love" page, the animation is choppy and rather hard to follow... I lost interest in it very quickly.

More to the point: it's not exactly clear that the user can navigate away from this page (the animation may imply to some users that something is still happening). The flow feels interrupted at this point and it seems you might better direct/capture the user to do/read something else. I'm not sure what that step might be, but it feels like a missed opportunity (for you).

I can really only speak to the "web/internet" side of this but http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2010-Main covers some good material.

I agree wholeheartedly, however some of the re-use headaches of using a framework with non-semantic class names can be mitigated if you're using some sort of include/templating layer (see my other post in this thread.) Done well, on a site with a fairly standardized design from page to page, you'd hopefully only have to edit the markup and/or class names in a few included files, and then the external CSS. This of course isn't going to help you if you inherit a mess, and you'd be better off just using "content descriptive class names" in the first place, but it can be an option.

Sensible includes/templating with PHP or whatever stack you're building on. This is so useful when done well, but I don't know how many times I've seen otherwise intelligent people sitting there copying the same markup/code into every file or banging their head off the wall when Dreamweaver or some other bloated suite tries to update a "template" on 4500 files and upload them to production.

The idea is simple: anything that you're going to put in more than a couple places/files, should be pulled out and put in a separate included file. Your doctype declaration? Your nav bar? Your generic site-wide footer? Put all these kinds of things in includes, update 1 file later and your changes take place everywhere.

It would be nice if the author would have acknowledged a reason for not sharing more about the product. Readers might get over not knowing WHAT, if they had a little of the WHY explained to them.

This might be neat, but it doesn't work and throws an error in firebug.

The short answer: it depends. For a personal one-off without any chance of profit? $10 (or whatever a 1-yr reg is). For anything else, it would be some spectrum depending on how profitable/viable the idea was, balanced against how important the domain name in question might realistically be to success.

But usually, it seems that the domain matters far less than just about everything else (so long as it is usable, reasonable length, etc).

Very nice! Displaying the tweets on hover is a nice touch.

What browser are you using? If it helps this behavior is NOT repeatable on windows in FF3.6, IE8, BUT observable in Chrome 9.

Worked as expected. Only thought would be shortening the "shortened" URL? I'm making some assumptions about what you're doing here but having 10 chars, assuming only A-Z, 0-9, (36 possible chars), gives the capacity for an unnecessarily large number of snippets.

Unless I'm half-awake at the moment, a 5 char string still yields more than 60 million possibilities, and shaves 5 chars off the URL for twitter etc.