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▲ 5 points

Ask HN: Review my app: Hacker Weekend

by stagas·15y ago·4 comments·view on hn ↗
Here's the URL: http://hwknd.com

It tracks tweets for new github.com repositories created this week, and posts them in a nice searchable list. It also displays languages used, collaborators and you can view readmes inline by clicking on the project's void.

There's also a search landing page for bookmarking purposes at: http://hwknd.com/search

Searching is word separated OR, and also indexes readmes and language names.

And a Language Wars chart (total lines of code this week): http://hwknd.com/languagewars

Also, if you sit on the home page, it will automatically inform you for any changes and display a (!) in the title, and then auto-refresh on window/tab focus.

It is written in node.js and runs completely stand-alone, with only a few modules dependencies (no extra processes).

Source code is at: http://github.com/stagas/hwknd.com (might be a bit behind in features) and is MIT licenced so you can fork it or clone it and run your own version.

I apologize for double posting this earlier this week, but there have been so many additions and features since then (it was just a blank page back then, all of the above was missing) that I felt I should repost: http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1955488

Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

4 comments
Positives:

- Dig the concept overall, I need a way to track new additions to Git.

- It's fast

- Adds more items as I scroll down, however it would be great to know when I've gotten to ones I've already read.

Some suggestions: - RSS?

- The dropdown readme functionality is awkward and not intuitive. Confusion as to where the hit area is and the expected interaction/net effort result.

- Simplify and ease opportunities to engage, add the add a repo to the homepage, maybe sidebar it.

- Repos should open up to new window?

- Allow someone to create a cart of things to research or auto-watch items without clicking through to each repo.

- Spend a little more time on the UI. Alternating row colors, maybe reduce the contrast of a white background against the creme background data set.

- The most significant data point on the page is the descriptions of what each package is, not the package name. I'd consider making that the title line.

First of all, thanks for taking the time to review. Your observations are really helpful.

I should add a thicker border separating pages. Also to notice is that infinite scroll is entirely client-side, so no Javascript enabled browsers will just get the pagination as normally.

RSS, yeah, it needs one.

The dropdown moving into view is an experiment, and I'm just testing to see how it goes. My thinking was to scroll the readme into view, and scroll up a bit more to put the next element right under the mouse pointer. So if you try clicking somewhere below the middle of the screen (depending on the size of your screen), you can browse the entire list without using mousewheel or moving your mouse from position, and every readme will scroll to the position you are looking. This is especially helpful if you do a search for something and want to view all of this week's items. But if it turns out to be confusing I'll remove it.

Links with target _new and _blank isn't something I like too much, so I leave it to user choice if they want to middle click or normal click, which is what they're used to already.

The cart idea is interesting, and has some potential. I think it should be made to watch the repo on your account on github, so it'll probably require you to login with your github credentials. Also something for the future as I'm not ready to do logins yet.

The UI needs work.

You're probably right about the description as title I'll try that.

Update: I tried description on top and didn't look as good. Maybe our mind isn't used of thinking so big paragraphs as titles and it was strange. If descriptions where short it would make sense, but now it's just random text which isn't easy on the eyes.

Also tried removing the autoscroll, and it wasn't as good either. The reason is I catch mousewheel over readmes because it was annoying when scrolling through a readme, to have the page scrolling when it ended. So now, if there was no scrolling to the next element, you wouldn't be able to scroll down unless you moved your mouse away from the readme. I hope that makes sense.

clickable: http://hwknd.com