5 ms·

Ask HN: Review my Startup - Preceden

28 points by matt1 17y ago

mbrubeck 17y ago
Awesome! But the "length of time" displayed is always "NaNy NaNm NaNd" (Chromium for Linux).
- matt1 17y ago
  Fixed -- thanks.
  - bmelton 17y ago
    I see that in Chromium on Linux, but I do NOT see it with Chrome on Windows 7.
    - iaskwhy 17y ago
      I see the same NaNy on Chrome 4, Windows 7. It's an excellent idea, good work!
bmelton 17y ago
This looks VERY nice. My only question that I don't see an immediate answer to is whether or not these timelines are embeddable from another site?
- matt1 17y ago
  Not yet -- this is a minimum viable product of sorts. Once I get the kinks worked out, that's one of the first things I want to do.
  - tbgvi 17y ago
    +1 to being able to embed. That would be a really nice feature to have and would build awareness for what you're working on. Every time someone embedded a timeline in their blog (or wherever) it would be free advertising. Looks great, good luck!
thinkbohemian 17y ago
I see you went with my favorite icon choice! looks good.
- matt1 17y ago
  He's referencing this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059075 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059075 And yeah, it was a great choice.
sunkencity 17y ago
Looks great!
jknupp 17y ago
A couple of questions: -The time-line on the front page seems to mark major life events. Why would I need a web site to remember when I got married or was in college? -In hindsight, it's easy to see what events were important (at any level of granularity) but much more difficult as things are happening. How do I know when something is sufficiently important to put it on a timeline? -What useful information are users supposed to be able to glean from this type of presentation of the data they enter? The example on the front page should show events that are interrelated and the copy should draw interesting conclusions from this. Right now, it seems like each time-line is totally orthogonal, which I can't really figure out the value of.
- matt1 17y ago
  Hey, good questions: - You might not be interested in making an biographical timeline for yourself, but consider making for your father or grandfather. If you're like me, you probably don't have a good idea of what they were doing and where they were when they were young. With these timelines, you can get a much better idea of how the events in their lives ultimately led to you. - And that's just biographical timelines. I'd like to see someone do a Y Combinator timeline, where companies are along the side and the spans of time represent their existence. It's very flexible and I think there's dozens of use cases. - The level of detail depends on what you want to discover. - Visualizing time is very hard. For example, imagine a timeline of World War II. There were a lot of moving pieces and simply by reading a block of text, it's not easy to get a feel for how they all relate to each other in time. Timelines, and especially these timelines, make it much easier. My hope is that people will build and discover timelines that make them go "Ah, I get it now."
  - jknupp 17y ago
    Your last example is exactly the type of thing that should be on your front page (see the end of my third question above). If you're trying to show how the service would be useful, present a time-line of something that would be difficult to understand or appreciate if presented another way. Most people (I assume) are pretty intimately familiar with their personal time-line.
danskil 17y ago
I don't see any prices. How much will this cost, and what structure are you using? Freemium?
- matt1 17y ago
  Free for now, likely some sort of freemium model in the future depending on how things go. It's too early to say for sure.
diN0bot 17y ago
chrome, mac 10.5 : i wish i could scroll horizontally using my macbook's mousepad (two fingers moving horizontally). i assume this doesn't work with a mouse wheel either, but i'm not sure. the click-and-drag method is less good, plus whenever my mouse leaves the square, unclicking does nothing...
- matt1 17y ago
  Thanks, that's a good idea. I'll see what I can do.
  - diN0bot 17y ago
    cool. i'm really digging this tool. more usability requests: * automatic scale adjustment, or at least continuous or more fine grained scale adjustment. i'd like to see all events at once...somewhere between years and decades. * reordering of events, or automatically ordering based on start times. this only matters when i view a large time scale and the titles don't fit on the bars, thus the events from a single layer cause the events to be laid out on different rows. i suppose abbreviating the titles so they do fit in the bars would be another solution.
    - matt1 17y ago
      Someone else recommended a "fit" zoom level, which would place them all on your screen at once at just the right resolution. I think it's a good idea too. Reordering events so that you can change the order they are rendered might be possible. Again, I worry about feature creep, since I don't know if this is something that will matter to a lot of people.
- diN0bot 17y ago
  also, it would be great if i could edit each event right on the timeline. that is, i want a single page for quick edits. the form could be below the timeline, activated whenever i click on an event or layer. whatever. if things take to long to edit to make right, this will waste too much time. ps - i do like it. always a pleasure playing with data viz. API? would love to incorporate this in my own time tracking projects.
chime 17y ago
Looks awesome! I need to be able to zoom in/out though. It would make for awesome Gantt charts.
- matt1 17y ago
  Eventually the dates will be dynamic, so you can base the start of one event on the start or end of another event, which opens up a lot of possibilities.
FreeRadical 17y ago
I've been looking for a timeline app over the last few days, but something with an API.
- matt1 17y ago
  API down the road for sure.
dangoldin 17y ago
This looks great. I can see this being used as a new resume format.
djb_hackernews 17y ago
Definitely a cool little webapp, and I can see it being more popular as an embeddable widget. Head scratcher how to monetize, because I don't see your website being a hangout so you can't go with ad supported, and I don't know if it is useful enough to pay for. You could sell it to evite, meetup etc. maybe. Or some type of project planning community for Gantt charts.
- matt1 17y ago
  Imagine a timeline for every major event that ever happened in the history of the universe. I wonder if that would be valuable? :)
Shamiq 17y ago
Interesting, I've always assumed the long form of "Jen" was spelled "Jennifer" rather than "Jeniffer".
- matt1 17y ago
  I've seen it both ways, but I changed it just for you.
  - Shamiq 17y ago
    <3
Concours 17y ago
That's awesome , it should fairly become popular. I've tried something like this a while ago based on an opensource calendar system, a kind of Win-project for normal folk, I just at some point set the project on standby but this is awesome. Just leave it as simple as it is, maybe an api and allow people to embed, that'll be fine.
Vindexus 17y ago
I really like the design. Good choice for the logo, looks great. I really think the Timeline editing page could use some Ajax/Dialogs. Instead of going to a new page for "Add Event" and "Add Layer", I think a dialog box popping up with the form in there would be great. The top padding on your buttons seems to be off. I'm using FireFox 3.5.7 and the text seems to be down by about 5 pixels too many. I changed padding-top from 15 to 10 and height from 30 to 35 to get the button on the right in this screenshot: http://imgur.com/FouGq http://imgur.com/FouGq The one on the left is the original that you have now. When scrolling through the timeline it would be nice to see if there are any events to the left or right. Maybe even stop scrolling if there are no more events back that far. I kept scrolling back to the 1800s on one timeline because I didn't know I'd already seen everything :P The yellow helper text at the top is really good for helping me get started. I like that you've put thought into blankstate pages. I am also curious how you'll monetize this. Any ideas? I was looking at your FAQ page and noticed this line: "This FAQ page is a work in progress. Chances are if you have a question, others have it too. On that note, please email us if anything is unclear". I'd like to completely selfishly point out my FAQ app, BreezyFAQ.com that would let you manage these easier. There's an "Ask a Question" form on the FAQ page and any asked questions get put into a queue that you can answer, and/or add to your FAQ page.
- matt1 17y ago
  Great feedback. Regarding the logo, I used CrowdSpring to run a design contest. In total, it costed $230. I'm really happy with it. I originally was leaning towards a different one, but HN helped set me straight (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059075 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059075). I just fixed the centering issue--it should render correctly now across all browsers. Thank you. I think I will add some sort of note or maybe color the years differently when there is nothing before or after the area you're scrolling. It confused a few other folks too. I ran a bunch of tests using FeedbackArmy, which sits on top of Mechanical Turk, and found a lot of people were confused when they got to the dashboard. I added those instructions, which improved the successfully-added-event conversion rate a lot. It's easy to forget that what's clear to you as the creator is not clear to new visitors. Monetization TBD. BreezyFAQ seems really useful. I might just roll my own to allow greater customization, but you're absolutely right in that it could be a lot better. Appreciate your thoughtful feedback. Let me know if you ever need any testing for your projects.
Shamiq 17y ago
Sweet, can I use this to build a resume?
- matt1 17y ago
  You can use it for whatever you want.* * Assuming its legal.
bgraves 17y ago
I'm not sure if you've done this, but I'm interested in some of the details on your venture. 1. What technologies are you using? 2. How long did it take you to code? 3. Is this your full time gig or just a side project that you hope takes off? 4. Do you plan to do any additional marketing/advertising? 5. What are some of the results from your split testing?
- matt1 17y ago
  Briefly: 1. Ruby on Rails/Heroku/jQuery 2. 3 months. See http://preceden.com/timelines/5-preceden http://preceden.com/timelines/5-preceden 3. Nights and weekends 4. I'm using AdWords at the moment, not necessarily because I'm hoping it will bring in a lot of users, mostly because I want to learn about AdWords. 5. Too early to tell; just started and haven't received enough traffic for the results to be meaningful. I have a blog (see profile) and I'll write extensively about these things over the coming weeks.
  - bgraves 17y ago
    Thank you for the responses. I look forward to reading more details on your blog.
bmelton 17y ago
One slight correction: on the FAQ for "What is Preceden", your answer includes the word "let's", which should be "lets". Also, on "Are They Private", you use the word "this'll", which I get as vernacular, but isn't a recognized conjunction in any of the dictionaries I checked.
- matt1 17y ago
  Got it. Thanks.

28 points by matt1 17y ago

mbrubeck 17y ago

Awesome! But the "length of time" displayed is always "NaNy NaNm NaNd" (Chromium for Linux).

matt1 17y ago
Fixed -- thanks.
- bmelton 17y ago
  I see that in Chromium on Linux, but I do NOT see it with Chrome on Windows 7.
  - iaskwhy 17y ago
    I see the same NaNy on Chrome 4, Windows 7. It's an excellent idea, good work!

bmelton 17y ago

This looks VERY nice. My only question that I don't see an immediate answer to is whether or not these timelines are embeddable from another site?

matt1 17y ago
Not yet -- this is a minimum viable product of sorts. Once I get the kinks worked out, that's one of the first things I want to do.
- tbgvi 17y ago
  +1 to being able to embed. That would be a really nice feature to have and would build awareness for what you're working on. Every time someone embedded a timeline in their blog (or wherever) it would be free advertising. Looks great, good luck!

thinkbohemian 17y ago

I see you went with my favorite icon choice! looks good.

matt1 17y ago
He's referencing this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059075 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059075 And yeah, it was a great choice.

sunkencity 17y ago

Looks great!

jknupp 17y ago

A couple of questions: -The time-line on the front page seems to mark major life events. Why would I need a web site to remember when I got married or was in college? -In hindsight, it's easy to see what events were important (at any level of granularity) but much more difficult as things are happening. How do I know when something is sufficiently important to put it on a timeline? -What useful information are users supposed to be able to glean from this type of presentation of the data they enter? The example on the front page should show events that are interrelated and the copy should draw interesting conclusions from this. Right now, it seems like each time-line is totally orthogonal, which I can't really figure out the value of.

matt1 17y ago
Hey, good questions: - You might not be interested in making an biographical timeline for yourself, but consider making for your father or grandfather. If you're like me, you probably don't have a good idea of what they were doing and where they were when they were young. With these timelines, you can get a much better idea of how the events in their lives ultimately led to you. - And that's just biographical timelines. I'd like to see someone do a Y Combinator timeline, where companies are along the side and the spans of time represent their existence. It's very flexible and I think there's dozens of use cases. - The level of detail depends on what you want to discover. - Visualizing time is very hard. For example, imagine a timeline of World War II. There were a lot of moving pieces and simply by reading a block of text, it's not easy to get a feel for how they all relate to each other in time. Timelines, and especially these timelines, make it much easier. My hope is that people will build and discover timelines that make them go "Ah, I get it now."
- jknupp 17y ago
  Your last example is exactly the type of thing that should be on your front page (see the end of my third question above). If you're trying to show how the service would be useful, present a time-line of something that would be difficult to understand or appreciate if presented another way. Most people (I assume) are pretty intimately familiar with their personal time-line.

danskil 17y ago

I don't see any prices. How much will this cost, and what structure are you using? Freemium?

matt1 17y ago
Free for now, likely some sort of freemium model in the future depending on how things go. It's too early to say for sure.

diN0bot 17y ago

chrome, mac 10.5 : i wish i could scroll horizontally using my macbook's mousepad (two fingers moving horizontally). i assume this doesn't work with a mouse wheel either, but i'm not sure. the click-and-drag method is less good, plus whenever my mouse leaves the square, unclicking does nothing...

matt1 17y ago
Thanks, that's a good idea. I'll see what I can do.
- diN0bot 17y ago
  cool. i'm really digging this tool. more usability requests: * automatic scale adjustment, or at least continuous or more fine grained scale adjustment. i'd like to see all events at once...somewhere between years and decades. * reordering of events, or automatically ordering based on start times. this only matters when i view a large time scale and the titles don't fit on the bars, thus the events from a single layer cause the events to be laid out on different rows. i suppose abbreviating the titles so they do fit in the bars would be another solution.
  - matt1 17y ago
    Someone else recommended a "fit" zoom level, which would place them all on your screen at once at just the right resolution. I think it's a good idea too. Reordering events so that you can change the order they are rendered might be possible. Again, I worry about feature creep, since I don't know if this is something that will matter to a lot of people.
diN0bot 17y ago
also, it would be great if i could edit each event right on the timeline. that is, i want a single page for quick edits. the form could be below the timeline, activated whenever i click on an event or layer. whatever. if things take to long to edit to make right, this will waste too much time. ps - i do like it. always a pleasure playing with data viz. API? would love to incorporate this in my own time tracking projects.

chime 17y ago

Looks awesome! I need to be able to zoom in/out though. It would make for awesome Gantt charts.

matt1 17y ago
Eventually the dates will be dynamic, so you can base the start of one event on the start or end of another event, which opens up a lot of possibilities.

FreeRadical 17y ago

I've been looking for a timeline app over the last few days, but something with an API.

matt1 17y ago
API down the road for sure.

dangoldin 17y ago

This looks great. I can see this being used as a new resume format.

djb_hackernews 17y ago

Definitely a cool little webapp, and I can see it being more popular as an embeddable widget. Head scratcher how to monetize, because I don't see your website being a hangout so you can't go with ad supported, and I don't know if it is useful enough to pay for. You could sell it to evite, meetup etc. maybe. Or some type of project planning community for Gantt charts.

matt1 17y ago
Imagine a timeline for every major event that ever happened in the history of the universe. I wonder if that would be valuable? :)

Shamiq 17y ago

Interesting, I've always assumed the long form of "Jen" was spelled "Jennifer" rather than "Jeniffer".

matt1 17y ago
I've seen it both ways, but I changed it just for you.
- Shamiq 17y ago
  <3

Concours 17y ago

That's awesome , it should fairly become popular. I've tried something like this a while ago based on an opensource calendar system, a kind of Win-project for normal folk, I just at some point set the project on standby but this is awesome. Just leave it as simple as it is, maybe an api and allow people to embed, that'll be fine.

Vindexus 17y ago

I really like the design. Good choice for the logo, looks great. I really think the Timeline editing page could use some Ajax/Dialogs. Instead of going to a new page for "Add Event" and "Add Layer", I think a dialog box popping up with the form in there would be great. The top padding on your buttons seems to be off. I'm using FireFox 3.5.7 and the text seems to be down by about 5 pixels too many. I changed padding-top from 15 to 10 and height from 30 to 35 to get the button on the right in this screenshot: http://imgur.com/FouGq http://imgur.com/FouGq The one on the left is the original that you have now. When scrolling through the timeline it would be nice to see if there are any events to the left or right. Maybe even stop scrolling if there are no more events back that far. I kept scrolling back to the 1800s on one timeline because I didn't know I'd already seen everything :P The yellow helper text at the top is really good for helping me get started. I like that you've put thought into blankstate pages. I am also curious how you'll monetize this. Any ideas? I was looking at your FAQ page and noticed this line: "This FAQ page is a work in progress. Chances are if you have a question, others have it too. On that note, please email us if anything is unclear". I'd like to completely selfishly point out my FAQ app, BreezyFAQ.com that would let you manage these easier. There's an "Ask a Question" form on the FAQ page and any asked questions get put into a queue that you can answer, and/or add to your FAQ page.

matt1 17y ago
Great feedback. Regarding the logo, I used CrowdSpring to run a design contest. In total, it costed $230. I'm really happy with it. I originally was leaning towards a different one, but HN helped set me straight (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059075 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059075). I just fixed the centering issue--it should render correctly now across all browsers. Thank you. I think I will add some sort of note or maybe color the years differently when there is nothing before or after the area you're scrolling. It confused a few other folks too. I ran a bunch of tests using FeedbackArmy, which sits on top of Mechanical Turk, and found a lot of people were confused when they got to the dashboard. I added those instructions, which improved the successfully-added-event conversion rate a lot. It's easy to forget that what's clear to you as the creator is not clear to new visitors. Monetization TBD. BreezyFAQ seems really useful. I might just roll my own to allow greater customization, but you're absolutely right in that it could be a lot better. Appreciate your thoughtful feedback. Let me know if you ever need any testing for your projects.

Shamiq 17y ago

Sweet, can I use this to build a resume?

matt1 17y ago
You can use it for whatever you want.* * Assuming its legal.

bgraves 17y ago

I'm not sure if you've done this, but I'm interested in some of the details on your venture. 1. What technologies are you using? 2. How long did it take you to code? 3. Is this your full time gig or just a side project that you hope takes off? 4. Do you plan to do any additional marketing/advertising? 5. What are some of the results from your split testing?

matt1 17y ago
Briefly: 1. Ruby on Rails/Heroku/jQuery 2. 3 months. See http://preceden.com/timelines/5-preceden http://preceden.com/timelines/5-preceden 3. Nights and weekends 4. I'm using AdWords at the moment, not necessarily because I'm hoping it will bring in a lot of users, mostly because I want to learn about AdWords. 5. Too early to tell; just started and haven't received enough traffic for the results to be meaningful. I have a blog (see profile) and I'll write extensively about these things over the coming weeks.
- bgraves 17y ago
  Thank you for the responses. I look forward to reading more details on your blog.

bmelton 17y ago

One slight correction: on the FAQ for "What is Preceden", your answer includes the word "let's", which should be "lets". Also, on "Are They Private", you use the word "this'll", which I get as vernacular, but isn't a recognized conjunction in any of the dictionaries I checked.

matt1 17y ago
Got it. Thanks.