70 ms·

Show HN: Amuzor, a new content curator we've been building

70 points by sebastianmck 14y ago

barredo 14y ago
Nice design. I'll add a few tag recomendations on the left menu so users can find them easily, and maybe even create their own list of tags they like to browse
- terabytest 14y ago
  Thank you! We already have a tab subscription feature, you can subscribe to a tag by visiting its page and clicking on 'subscribe'. We're also looking into new ways to present suggestions to our users.
jeffehobbs 14y ago
You should check this on an ipad. The layout is doing some squishy, floaty things.
- terabytest 14y ago
  It should work if you put it in landscape mode, but it's something we'll look into. Sorry about that!
- nasmorn 14y ago
  You should check it on your phone. "mobile devices are unsupported" Very nice. How can this be more helpful than the desktop version
- lemma 14y ago
  I can't open it on an ipad 1 (safari or chrome). It crashes after a few seconds of trying to load.
lnanek2 14y ago
The page looks really beautiful in general. A single scrolling list feels really old fashioned though compared to modern grids like Pinterest. The Google Ads are huge and white and ugly and don't fit at all as well. I'd rather even image ads, but don't think you should have ads at all while you are trying to build traction/users. You might be driving off 10% of users to earn a few pennies a week when starting out, and your product may have lots of bugs and be lower quality then it will be later on, so may not be strong enough to keep a user around despite the ads.
- sebastianmck 14y ago
  We've tweaked the ad color scheme so it doesn't clash as much with the rest of the site. As for having ads now, we plan to run off advertising income and we'd rather be honest about that up front, rather than launching without ads and potentially giving our users a rude shock when we add them in later.
geuis 14y ago
"Mobile devices are currently unsupported." What, exactly, is there to support? Is your site Flash or java based? If so, that's a decision that should be reconsidered. Assuming its html and js like most other sites, it turns out my phone has a perfectly capable and modern browser on it. Indeed, I'm using it right now to leave this very critique. Don't tell the user they can't do something because their browser "isn't supported". Of course their browser is supported if its anything made in the last 4 years. I'm hypothesizing you think you need some dumbed down "optimized" mobile experience. That might be a nice thing to have down the road, but is absolutely no reason to put up a wall when you're trying to launch.
- riffraff 14y ago
  I don't know what it is, but there is something requiring a plugin as the first item in the page, I imagine they may be thinking of that kind of things (videos, audio)
- sebastianmck 14y ago
  Sorry about that. I've deployed a fix that removes the mobile block. It seems to work fine on the Android browser, but on iOS if you zoom in any further than the default zoom level then the sidebar floats and gets in the way of the content. We'll work on fixing that, but at least you're now able to access the basic content.
  - aidos 14y ago
    That's an issue on narrower desktop browsers too (for me in Chrome at least). Kudos though, it looks really nice!
  - geuis 14y ago
    Looks great (again from a phone). Couple of minor things: you can't swipe to the top to expose the address bar, close button on overlays doesn't seem to work, changing options like Safe to Show only change if you hit them twice and the page reloads. There's some zooming issues, but those are minor. Ready liking the content. I do bread baking as a hobby and the first thing I saw was a time lapse dough rising. Very cool.
shortformblog 14y ago
It's a nice concept (and the fact that you have ads off to the side is great because too few sites of this nature worry about business model), and I appreciate the focus on credit, but I guess my question is this: Clearly the site that this reminds people the most of is Tumblr (I also see shades of imgur and 9gag in this), and Tumblr has some distinct advantages in that it allows you to create a site around the stuff you curate, and also has a few other options. But — and here's something key — you can customize the experience as much or as little as you want. Does this design focus too much on the centralized angle of the site as a whole and too little on the end user? It seems like the design of this site doesn't offer much in the way of customization and doesn't seem focused on letting end users make the content "theirs" as much as the collective whole. This is reinforced by the fact that you discourage repeat posts — a key difference between this and Tumblr, where they have a reblog button essentially designed to allow repeat posts. While that kind of approach makes sense for an individual blog, if you're looking to build this out as a wider content-curation tool, you should focus on the end user pages. Now, this approach doesn't need to look like Tumblr. Look at what RebelMouse does. While it's somewhat Pinterest-y, it has a few key differences, such as the ability to customize HTML and embed on user websites. I guess that, if you sold this as an alternative to imgur that can do a couple of extra things for Reddit users that imgur can't, that would be an angle. But I think the reason why people use curation tools is that they're trying to curate for themselves and not the site itself. Let me know what you think.
- terabytest 14y ago
  We're still experimenting with various ideas and the main point in our release was to get an MVP out as soon as possible. This is the first major publicly released website for the both of us so it's still a learning experience.
  - shortformblog 14y ago
    I appreciate that consideration. I guess that was my effort to offer constructive criticism as far as scope goes.
- sebastianmck 14y ago
brador 14y ago
You might want to check the rules on floating adsense/locking adsense position on scroll. Last time I checked it was not allowed. Yes 9gag does it.
- sebastianmck 14y ago
  Oops we weren't aware, thanks for the heads up!
jnazario 14y ago
digistagram++
DanBC 14y ago
I like it! I was gently confused by the "We put a feedback link on everypage" comment. (http://imgur.com/YoB3G http://imgur.com/YoB3G) Is that only for people signed in?
- terabytest 14y ago
  Oh, yeah it is! We'll clarify it on the page. Thanks!
billturner 14y ago
Visiting in Chrome on OSX, it started a download of the SoundCloud widget HTML.
- charliesome 14y ago
  I'm also a Chrome user on OS X, but I can't reproduce this... Maybe check if it's one of your extensions?
  - billturner 14y ago
    I've disabled all extensions, and the same thing happens. In fact, there's also a warning that "This site is attempting to download multiple files. Do you want to allow this?" I'm on Mountain Lion, Chrome Version 23.0.1271.101 Edited to add: This happens on page load, before there is any interaction with the page.
- geargrinder 14y ago
  This was an unwelcome surprise for me too.
  - terabytest 14y ago
    Does this happen to you when you interact with it or when the page loads? EDIT: might it also be the effect of one of the extensions you might have installed?
    - EwanG 14y ago
      It happens to me on Windows also, and the particular copy I was using is my sandboxed Chrome with no plugins (for sites I'm not sure of). It happened as the page was loading, I immediately got a DL requestor, and the same warning message. That pretty much had me closing the window ASAP.
liljimmytables 14y ago
Very clean, and I like the content. What platform did you build it on?
hiddenstage 14y ago
Automatically downloaded a soundcloud file. It then told me "This site is requesting you download multiple files. Allow or Deny." Running Chrome for Android.
- CaveTech 14y ago
  That would be a sound cloud issue, no?
  - hiddenstage 14y ago
    Maybe code-wise but it makes the given URL look bad.
- terabytest 14y ago
  That's strange, I have never seen it happen. Could you please give me the URL it happens on for you? Thanks.
  - hiddenstage 14y ago
    http://amuzor.com/submissions http://amuzor.com/submissions
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - cliff 14y ago
    It happened to me on chrome on Windows on the front page. Kinda freaked me out as it started downloading a strange file immediately.
Hawkee 14y ago
At first I didn't know what the site was about. There is no introduction or tagline to make it clear. And while the layout looks somewhat Bootstrappy it is not responsive at all. It scales very poorly to the point that the navigation slides away to the right as I resize my window. I wouldn't introduce a new site without first making it responsive. It does look like you've got some decent content, so you're off to a good start in that regard. It just needs to work on any size display.
- terabytest 14y ago
  Thanks for letting us know. We've added a quick introduction to the site for new users that appears on your first visit. We're also currently working on bringing out a responsive/mobile interface.
marknutter 14y ago
I like the site design - the darker them really makes photos pop. I am not a fan of the name though; I've always found that names that have ambiguous pronunciations are always the easiest for people to forget.
jeffjose 14y ago
1. URLs should update with the filters I choose. It looks like all of them are POST requests. This breaks bookmarking, backbutton and slew of other things. HTML5 makes it easier for webapps like this with their pushHistory feature. Take a look at that 2. When I hover on the item to see what it is linked to, I get a "fake" amuzuor/../outbound_link - I like to see where I'd end up, before I click. I couldnt find a place for that.
- sebastianmck 14y ago
  I've replaced the outbound_link urls with the direct ones. The original intent was to track clicks so we could do some analytics on it but it's not worth it at this stage. I'll look into changing the behaviour of filters, thanks! edit: Deployed a patch that will change the filters to permalinks.
mattdeboard 14y ago
Can you share a bit about the technology behind it? edit: Also one very very minor pet peeve of mine is when you have an activation code in email with punctuation around it, e.g. > Your activation code is 123456. Chrome actually does a good job of disregarding the period when I double click to highlight. Sorry for the bikeshedding!
- sebastianmck 14y ago
  Sure. It's powered by a custom framework running on NodeJS. Links screenshots are taken by PhantomJS and images are compressed/optimised by ImageMagick, Jpegtran, Pngcrush, and Optipng. If you have additional questions I'd be more than happy to answer them. edit: Ahh good point, I'll be sure to remove the dot.
JshWright 14y ago
A video consisting of a single profanity... A picture of a pink lake labelled "Nobody knows why" (it's fairly well understood that it's bacteria that gives the dozens of pink salt lakes around the world their color)... A picture of a harbor seal bizarrely labelled a 'manatee' I realize this is more about the platform than the content, but the content kinda sucks...
- hnriot 14y ago
  the whole thing reeks of being extremely poorly thought out.
g2e 14y ago
Awesome! I like the dark colours but I think it would be wiser to have a much lighter theme as a default.
nobodysfool 14y ago
A ton of photos, but I see only a single text post. If you are hoping for a more mature community, you're going to need more text-only posts.

70 points by sebastianmck 14y ago

Nice design. I'll add a few tag recomendations on the left menu so users can find them easily, and maybe even create their own list of tags they like to browse

terabytest 14y ago
Thank you! We already have a tab subscription feature, you can subscribe to a tag by visiting its page and clicking on 'subscribe'. We're also looking into new ways to present suggestions to our users.

jeffehobbs 14y ago

You should check this on an ipad. The layout is doing some squishy, floaty things.

terabytest 14y ago
It should work if you put it in landscape mode, but it's something we'll look into. Sorry about that!
nasmorn 14y ago
You should check it on your phone. "mobile devices are unsupported" Very nice. How can this be more helpful than the desktop version
lemma 14y ago
I can't open it on an ipad 1 (safari or chrome). It crashes after a few seconds of trying to load.

lnanek2 14y ago

The page looks really beautiful in general. A single scrolling list feels really old fashioned though compared to modern grids like Pinterest. The Google Ads are huge and white and ugly and don't fit at all as well. I'd rather even image ads, but don't think you should have ads at all while you are trying to build traction/users. You might be driving off 10% of users to earn a few pennies a week when starting out, and your product may have lots of bugs and be lower quality then it will be later on, so may not be strong enough to keep a user around despite the ads.

sebastianmck 14y ago
We've tweaked the ad color scheme so it doesn't clash as much with the rest of the site. As for having ads now, we plan to run off advertising income and we'd rather be honest about that up front, rather than launching without ads and potentially giving our users a rude shock when we add them in later.

geuis 14y ago

"Mobile devices are currently unsupported." What, exactly, is there to support? Is your site Flash or java based? If so, that's a decision that should be reconsidered. Assuming its html and js like most other sites, it turns out my phone has a perfectly capable and modern browser on it. Indeed, I'm using it right now to leave this very critique. Don't tell the user they can't do something because their browser "isn't supported". Of course their browser is supported if its anything made in the last 4 years. I'm hypothesizing you think you need some dumbed down "optimized" mobile experience. That might be a nice thing to have down the road, but is absolutely no reason to put up a wall when you're trying to launch.

riffraff 14y ago
I don't know what it is, but there is something requiring a plugin as the first item in the page, I imagine they may be thinking of that kind of things (videos, audio)
sebastianmck 14y ago
Sorry about that. I've deployed a fix that removes the mobile block. It seems to work fine on the Android browser, but on iOS if you zoom in any further than the default zoom level then the sidebar floats and gets in the way of the content. We'll work on fixing that, but at least you're now able to access the basic content.
- aidos 14y ago
  That's an issue on narrower desktop browsers too (for me in Chrome at least). Kudos though, it looks really nice!
- geuis 14y ago
  Looks great (again from a phone). Couple of minor things: you can't swipe to the top to expose the address bar, close button on overlays doesn't seem to work, changing options like Safe to Show only change if you hit them twice and the page reloads. There's some zooming issues, but those are minor. Ready liking the content. I do bread baking as a hobby and the first thing I saw was a time lapse dough rising. Very cool.

shortformblog 14y ago

It's a nice concept (and the fact that you have ads off to the side is great because too few sites of this nature worry about business model), and I appreciate the focus on credit, but I guess my question is this: Clearly the site that this reminds people the most of is Tumblr (I also see shades of imgur and 9gag in this), and Tumblr has some distinct advantages in that it allows you to create a site around the stuff you curate, and also has a few other options. But — and here's something key — you can customize the experience as much or as little as you want. Does this design focus too much on the centralized angle of the site as a whole and too little on the end user? It seems like the design of this site doesn't offer much in the way of customization and doesn't seem focused on letting end users make the content "theirs" as much as the collective whole. This is reinforced by the fact that you discourage repeat posts — a key difference between this and Tumblr, where they have a reblog button essentially designed to allow repeat posts. While that kind of approach makes sense for an individual blog, if you're looking to build this out as a wider content-curation tool, you should focus on the end user pages. Now, this approach doesn't need to look like Tumblr. Look at what RebelMouse does. While it's somewhat Pinterest-y, it has a few key differences, such as the ability to customize HTML and embed on user websites. I guess that, if you sold this as an alternative to imgur that can do a couple of extra things for Reddit users that imgur can't, that would be an angle. But I think the reason why people use curation tools is that they're trying to curate for themselves and not the site itself. Let me know what you think.

terabytest 14y ago
We're still experimenting with various ideas and the main point in our release was to get an MVP out as soon as possible. This is the first major publicly released website for the both of us so it's still a learning experience.
- shortformblog 14y ago
  I appreciate that consideration. I guess that was my effort to offer constructive criticism as far as scope goes.
sebastianmck 14y ago

brador 14y ago

You might want to check the rules on floating adsense/locking adsense position on scroll. Last time I checked it was not allowed. Yes 9gag does it.

sebastianmck 14y ago
Oops we weren't aware, thanks for the heads up!

jnazario 14y ago

digistagram++

DanBC 14y ago

I like it! I was gently confused by the "We put a feedback link on everypage" comment. (http://imgur.com/YoB3G http://imgur.com/YoB3G) Is that only for people signed in?

terabytest 14y ago
Oh, yeah it is! We'll clarify it on the page. Thanks!

billturner 14y ago

Visiting in Chrome on OSX, it started a download of the SoundCloud widget HTML.

charliesome 14y ago
I'm also a Chrome user on OS X, but I can't reproduce this... Maybe check if it's one of your extensions?
- billturner 14y ago
  I've disabled all extensions, and the same thing happens. In fact, there's also a warning that "This site is attempting to download multiple files. Do you want to allow this?" I'm on Mountain Lion, Chrome Version 23.0.1271.101 Edited to add: This happens on page load, before there is any interaction with the page.
geargrinder 14y ago
This was an unwelcome surprise for me too.
- terabytest 14y ago
  Does this happen to you when you interact with it or when the page loads? EDIT: might it also be the effect of one of the extensions you might have installed?
  - EwanG 14y ago
    It happens to me on Windows also, and the particular copy I was using is my sandboxed Chrome with no plugins (for sites I'm not sure of). It happened as the page was loading, I immediately got a DL requestor, and the same warning message. That pretty much had me closing the window ASAP.

liljimmytables 14y ago

Very clean, and I like the content. What platform did you build it on?

hiddenstage 14y ago

Automatically downloaded a soundcloud file. It then told me "This site is requesting you download multiple files. Allow or Deny." Running Chrome for Android.

CaveTech 14y ago
That would be a sound cloud issue, no?
- hiddenstage 14y ago
  Maybe code-wise but it makes the given URL look bad.
terabytest 14y ago
That's strange, I have never seen it happen. Could you please give me the URL it happens on for you? Thanks.
- hiddenstage 14y ago
  http://amuzor.com/submissions http://amuzor.com/submissions
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- cliff 14y ago
  It happened to me on chrome on Windows on the front page. Kinda freaked me out as it started downloading a strange file immediately.

Hawkee 14y ago

At first I didn't know what the site was about. There is no introduction or tagline to make it clear. And while the layout looks somewhat Bootstrappy it is not responsive at all. It scales very poorly to the point that the navigation slides away to the right as I resize my window. I wouldn't introduce a new site without first making it responsive. It does look like you've got some decent content, so you're off to a good start in that regard. It just needs to work on any size display.

terabytest 14y ago
Thanks for letting us know. We've added a quick introduction to the site for new users that appears on your first visit. We're also currently working on bringing out a responsive/mobile interface.

marknutter 14y ago

I like the site design - the darker them really makes photos pop. I am not a fan of the name though; I've always found that names that have ambiguous pronunciations are always the easiest for people to forget.

jeffjose 14y ago

1. URLs should update with the filters I choose. It looks like all of them are POST requests. This breaks bookmarking, backbutton and slew of other things. HTML5 makes it easier for webapps like this with their pushHistory feature. Take a look at that 2. When I hover on the item to see what it is linked to, I get a "fake" amuzuor/../outbound_link - I like to see where I'd end up, before I click. I couldnt find a place for that.

sebastianmck 14y ago
I've replaced the outbound_link urls with the direct ones. The original intent was to track clicks so we could do some analytics on it but it's not worth it at this stage. I'll look into changing the behaviour of filters, thanks! edit: Deployed a patch that will change the filters to permalinks.

mattdeboard 14y ago

Can you share a bit about the technology behind it? edit: Also one very very minor pet peeve of mine is when you have an activation code in email with punctuation around it, e.g. > Your activation code is 123456. Chrome actually does a good job of disregarding the period when I double click to highlight. Sorry for the bikeshedding!

sebastianmck 14y ago
Sure. It's powered by a custom framework running on NodeJS. Links screenshots are taken by PhantomJS and images are compressed/optimised by ImageMagick, Jpegtran, Pngcrush, and Optipng. If you have additional questions I'd be more than happy to answer them. edit: Ahh good point, I'll be sure to remove the dot.

JshWright 14y ago

A video consisting of a single profanity... A picture of a pink lake labelled "Nobody knows why" (it's fairly well understood that it's bacteria that gives the dozens of pink salt lakes around the world their color)... A picture of a harbor seal bizarrely labelled a 'manatee' I realize this is more about the platform than the content, but the content kinda sucks...

hnriot 14y ago
the whole thing reeks of being extremely poorly thought out.

g2e 14y ago

Awesome! I like the dark colours but I think it would be wiser to have a much lighter theme as a default.

nobodysfool 14y ago

A ton of photos, but I see only a single text post. If you are hoping for a more mature community, you're going to need more text-only posts.