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Show HN: OSwatch – A News Aggregation Site for Open-Source Software
- ddoolin 11y agoI like the idea but perhaps OSSwatch would be a better name?
- d99kris 11y agoYes, I realize the name clash with http://oswatch.org/ http://oswatch.org/ and the fact that OSS is a more proper abbreviation of open source software. The name was picked based on the name "open source watch". May rename in the future if it makes sense, but it's just a small side project.
- thomasdd 11y agoI was used to check http://osnews.com/ http://osnews.com/ daily for Years now. But for me, they update frequency is quite poor, so i stopped visiting the site at all. This looks promissing and nice.
- d99kris 11y agoThanks! To ensure timely updates I "cheated" and have subscriptions set up for a bunch of open source projects announcement lists, and auto-posting them to osnews.
- petecooper 11y agoNot to be mistaken for/confused with: http://oss-watch.ac.uk http://oss-watch.ac.uk
- linker3000 11y agoNor: http://oswatch.org/ http://oswatch.org/
- raimue 11y agoThe automatic postings by listbot should contain the original source URL. Some posts are not helpful if there is no way to get to the project's website. Also the formatting of the automatic excerpt is sometimes broken, so I would prefer the original posts on the project's website.
- d99kris 11y agoThanks for the constructive criticism, it's a good suggestion - I've been contemplating the same myself. I'll look into how I can obtain official original links (currently the information is fed via email).
- raimue 11y agoIn some cases the List-Archive header contains a HTTP link to the mail in the archive. But often enough it is just a link to the archive in general, so not a general solution. You could leverage the Gmane archive, which allows linking to mails by Message-Id like this: http://mid.gmane.org/<CA+55aFx93de2f2bRbCp74uNX0LxkgpSKE8uOGFrk63xe_9YDwg@mail.gmail.com> http://mid.gmane.org/<CA+55aFx93de2f2bRbCp74uNX0LxkgpSKE8uOG...
- d99kris 11y agoThanks for the suggestion! Will definitely look into that!
- ahmedfromtunis 11y agoI find the use of two tagging systems a bit off and may harm the aesthetic and usability of the site.
- d99kris 11y agoI guess you are referring to some submission titles containing [Project Name] and at the same time carrying a tag-"button"? The submission titles for automated submission are taken from the email subject, and kept to make twitter/facebook feeds have proper context. But I'll look into how I can clean it up - especially from the oswatch.net front page itself.
- purpled_haze 11y agoA problem with the domain name is that to mean OS means operating system. Also, hardcore free software folks hate using the term "open-source" for their free code. But, I hope it does well and will keep an eye on it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mattlutze 11y agoWhen I first noticed the headline on the HN wall, I thought it was a show-and-tell for new smart watch software. OP, for some reason I'm getting verification errors when trying to load the site. My office has some rather aggressive firewall policies, but I might look at the SSL cert.
- yaworsk 11y agoFor what it's worth, I had the same first impression...
- d99kris 11y agoIf you don't mind sharing the error you encountered (screenshot?) feel free to drop me an email - address in my profile. I just got the SSL via Namecheap a few days back, I haven't had issues with them before, but I'm by no means an expert on certs, and may have set up something wrongly.
- 11y ago
- magicmu 11y agoGreat idea, I'll definitely follow! Is the site itself open source? If so, I'd love to help out.
- amatera 11y agoThe site is build on the Lobsters Rails Project (https://github.com/jcs/lobsters https://github.com/jcs/lobsters)
- d99kris 11y agoThanks! Actually the implementation is based on https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs code at https://github.com/jcs/lobsters https://github.com/jcs/lobsters but yes, the plan is to open source this fork quite soon.
- magicmu 11y agoCool! I'll keep an eye out :)
- carlchenet 11y agowhat's the difference with lobste.rs ?
- d99kris 11y agoOSwatch is focused on open source news, or sharing of open source projects, while I believe lobste.rs targets broader topics/audience. Implementation-wise OSwatch is very similar, being a fork of lobste.rs.
- beshrkayali 11y agoReally cool to see the moderation log. Hope that it contains everything and doesn't apply certain filters for certain actions. I'd like to see the same thing for HN.
- d99kris 11y agoI can't take any credit for that, as I forked lobste.rs implementation which already has that feature. But yes, I like the transparency too.
- vmateixeira 11y agoIt may be useful, thanks, will keep an eye on it. Although, its name made me think of a new Swatch watch and I found it a bit slow. Also you should consider adding some font color other than gray.
- vmateixeira 11y agoAnd please consider changing the favicon perhaps? (letters too small)
- d99kris 11y agoThanks for the feedback! It was the last item I was planning to address before "launching" the site, but I decided to put it off for another day. It'll soon be fixed.
- d99kris 11y agoThanks, will review the color scheme again.. The name will be addressed. Regarding the slowness, I hope it's a temporary thing - the HN effect - my 512MB droplet is struggling a bit at the moment.
- CrowFly 11y agoA search for "Erlang" showed zero results.
- brudgers 11y agoThought provoking [0] . How will the site will filter for informational value? There are huge numbers of releases on a vast array of software most people won't care for following even if it is important, e.g. the Linux kernel, Hadoop, Spring. The hard problem is determining what votes confirm. That is, what distinguishes a good submission from a bad submission is what makes a community. If it's just votes without standards then me and my friends and our sockpuppets can make it all about the LOL's. Others have touched on the hard problem of community in regard to the name. From a community standpoint, there's no big tent uniting all open source communities any more than there's a big tent uniting all political communities. There are three big approaches to contributions: copy left, any use allowed, and assign copyright to the project. [1] It's politics by any other name. Some people play the game hard. A few play it for keeps. And most people don't really care very much except when there's titillating gossip or a bare knuckled knife fight. And on the internet, my money would be on people tuning in for an unending stream of unreconciled battles royale. The term "free and open source software" is a way institutions sluff off accusations of having taken a stance even though the institutions have -- for adamant copy leftists there's no disjunction between "free" and "open source" that requires the "and". As the institutional view has come to mainstream development, there's been an opportunity for institutions to collapse the terminology down to "open source" which is a property not a community. It's only cold calculation and good manners that keep technology CEO's from saying "Richard Stallman, who the fuck are you and who pays you?" Catering to the open source community suffers from the problem that it's hard to capture a market segment and build a community around it. Rationalizing along the lines of "There are one billion people in China and all we need to do is charge each of them $1.00" is easier even though it doesn't work for any institution other than the government of China and even then not so much. My advice: + Scale back the idea where it is clearer who might use it and what value those people will get from investing in building a community. More importantly, it needs to be clearer who might almost be the right fit but: fail to see the attraction, not abide by community standards, lurk, go off and clone it on a different topic. + Start with something clear and narrow and with some semblance of an existing community, e.g. projects under the Apache foundation. Even better if there is some buzz, e.g. Microsoft's open source efforts. + Building around enterprise is actually congruent with the idea of "open source". It also may be easier to impose higher standards of behavior than are typical of the internet. Finally, I doubt that the look and feel of Hacker News is the secret sauce. I suspect that it's mostly what I don't see that makes it work. This turned out to be more of an exercise than I expected. Imagine that. Good luck. [0]: To state the obvious. [1]: I'm not not advocating one position over the other. I'm just coarsely modeling. Like all models it's wrong, but it may be useful.
- andrewulrich 11y ago@d99kris I just went to the filters page, and saved filters, went back to the home page, and the filters were not applied. I am not logged in; does it only work when you're logged in? If so, you might want to hide that link for non-logged in users.
- d99kris 11y agoThanks! Yes it's actually supposed to work with cookies, but I haven't tested this properly. Will probably follow your advice and hide it for non-logged in users until I'm sure it's working correctly.
- unixhero 11y agoI dig the innovative user interface metaphor. It's refreshing.
- d99kris 11y agoI'm by no means a UI expert nor an English native speaker so I'm not sure if you're sarcastic. Would you mind elaborating on the feedback?
- unixhero 11y agoEnglish is not my first language either. Sarcasm has no place here on Hacker News, and I was not being sarcastic. I guess I could have elaborated. I think the way you have placed the category/categories, website domainname on each row is interesting. Also how comments are moved to a separate area which I find a fresh take!
- SunShiranui 11y agoI think your default text size is a bit too tiny (I'm on a 1920x1080 15" display). Although that's a problem for HN as well.
- d99kris 11y agoOK noted. It was also highlighted by others, will address this (tomorrow).
- antstorm 11y agoIt's really important to understand that the news aggregation site is not about topic or implementation, it's all about the community around it. So instead of forming your own, why not improve existing? Filtered by "open-source" tag? By no means trying to ruin your enthusiasm here, but please DO consider using one of the existing aggregators for the same purpose. Also Open Source seems like a very broad topic to me, covering most of the programming languages, *nix systems and so on...
- d99kris 11y agoYes, it's all valid feedback. I kind of felt a gap for a timely updated and focused news source focused on "open source". At this point I don't plan to shift to an existing news aggregator, but if you don't mind sharing - do you have any in mind that would allow such filtering?
- antstorm 11y agoI don't think guys at lobste.rs would mind this approach, try starting a discussion on GitHub. Obvious choice here of course is Reddit, but it's a bit overblown.
- d99kris 11y agoThanks for the suggestion! Will reach out to jcs. Reddit may not be optimal though I feel.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- giancarlostoro 11y agoNice work, naming aside, I would suggest maybe if possible add an IRC channel (you don't have to host your own server or anything, Freenode or Quakenet etc is fine). It could help build up a community whilst things are slow, and registration is still invite only it seems.
- d99kris 11y agoThanks! I hadn't thought about having an IRC channel. I'm trying to keep up with the invitations. Didn't honestly expect that much interest. :) I hope the website is still usable (I'm monitoring 'top' here and ruby/nginx is still constantly below 25%). I'll probably not be setting up an IRC channel today/tonight as it's pretty late where I am, but may consider it in the future.
- jlgaddis 11y agoPlease make it possible to block/ignore postings by specific usernames (e.g. "listbot"). That's 75% of the front page right now and I already get a number of those in my inbox. For me, at least, it's pretty annoying.
- d99kris 11y agoGood suggestion! I'm thinking I can create a tag specifically for automated submissions. I'll look into this tomorrow.
- boyanpro 11y agoWhat is technology behind it? How do you automatically collect news?
- d99kris 11y agoThe base site is based on lobste.rs and the automatic news collection is just email subscriptions to a bunch of open source projects announcement mailing lists. I may need to extend it to poll websites or github for release notes in the future, as some (still relevant) projects do not have mailing lists.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoI thought it was about about operating systems when I saw the name. Kind of like OSnews. Probably should've been OSSwatch.
- gkya 11y agoCame here for the exact same comment. And, while at it, consider also FOSSwatch, as the free software people do not think that open soure includes their philosophy.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoYeah, we were thinking along same lines: OSSwatch and FOSSwatch came to mind for comment. I deliberately avoided mentioning FOSSwatch due to the ideological angle you mentioned. I figured someone from OSS or FOSS one would be on the attack in minutes haha.
- gkya 11y agoWell, there are a lot of zealots in every camp, so they'd attack even if you named it PISSwatch. But you have spent time and put out great, useful work, and nobody has the right to complain, as you didn't do it because you had to, but because of your good will. Kudos for that, very nice website.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoI agree. They put in the work and got the results. Anyone that doesn't like it can have an opinion but is just talking rather than building. ;)
- smt88 11y agoI don't know what code you're using, but there's actually a great piece of OSS that does exactly what you need: http://www.telescopeapp.org/ http://www.telescopeapp.org/
- wilsonfiifi 11y agoAwesome! This is great! Will try and get this running on dokku. Thanks for the link!