4 ms·

Show HN: Newscombinator

7 points by tomw1808 12y ago

tomw1808 12y ago
OP here, was hoping to get some feedback from the HN community on my tool here. The landingpage for now: http://nagrgtr.com http://nagrgtr.com and there is more to come. Thank you.
- smt88 12y ago
  Newscombinator and the landing page are very difficult to read. There are lots of fonts that are too low-contrast or too small. There isn't lots of good visual separation between different elements. I don't want to get into a huge usability discussion right now, but it's important, and you should definitely look into it.
  - tomw1808 12y ago
    Most definitely thankful for any comments on ux, as I'm a backed developer normally. :) it sometimes the blindness of the developer that needs different eyes to look at the project.. Will try to improve and impress, thank you.
  - greggh 12y ago
    Everything smt88 just said. It is hard on the eyes, hard to read. The site itself actually looks like something I would read and share with everyone if the UI/UX issues get worked out.
    - tomw1808 12y ago
      Interesting, is there any specific font face or size that you'd recommend? I know ui/ux is always very subtle, but i have the feeling that there must be a golden standard and i miss that...
  - tomw1808 12y ago
    So it be HN, increased the overall font-size and reduced the font-faces. Thank you.
ch215 12y ago
For me, neither website renders without javascript. A blank screen's a poor first impression. Maybe it's a pet peeve but I'm sure I'm not the only one who blocks JS by default. Also, making the panels on the right of the landing page opaque would aid readability.
- tomw1808 12y ago
  Thank you, I'll take is as a valuable feedback for the landingpage, which really needs some more improvement. Regarding the non-JS users. I am wondering how you can survive in the modern web. That shouldn't be meant as offensive statement, rather than I have the gut feeling that most websites are more like apps currently, running heavily on JS. That really makes me wonder...
  - ch215 12y ago
    No offense taken. I use noscript to whitelist websites and grant temporary permissions to others as needed. To clarify, I have no problem with you using JS. I know I may have to enable it go gain functionality sometimes. My gripe is that on your sites I get zero functionality without it. I don't mean to cause offense either. Thought it may be something you hadn't considered is all.
    - tomw1808 12y ago
      You're absolutely right, I didn't consider it at all, shame on me, and a lot of shame. Actually, I didn't even think of it, although that is something I am almost praying when working with clients: make your sites at least usable without JS. Weird that I got caught there. Thank you.
tomw1808 12y ago
Let me give some more information. First, lesson learned, do not post on HN when tired. The ups and downs after posting are incredible, even if its just a private project. I couldn't be more thankful for the powerful emotions that arrive when I see my code in the open wild after weeks and months of coding. :) The tool here is "just a frontend" I've build as an API-sideproject of mine. So, what does it do? In one sentence: Newscombinator gathers news from different sources, downloads it, makes a screenshot, cleans it, natural language process it, and push it through a MySQL DB into a Solr index. The Solr-select handler is passed through a REST handler. Why that, why not directly the solr select handler? Because the REST handler also exposes endpoints to the MySQL Database. Some things are just not feasible in Solr alone. For example its hard to build aggregation queries in solr (think: SELECT AVG(points), SUM(points) FROM ... WHERE date_news_found ...), I've made that available in MySQL. And its easy to shift all that to a MariaDB cluster, or to an Amazon RDS, just in case... What is available here is a RESTful interface to a Solr-Index with all Hacker-News articles, selected Reddits, etc, starting from Oct 2014. That is around 200k of articles. Including searchable content. I think that is a good base to start with for me. Thank you in the meantime HN, I've learned something.

7 points by tomw1808 12y ago

OP here, was hoping to get some feedback from the HN community on my tool here. The landingpage for now: http://nagrgtr.com http://nagrgtr.com and there is more to come. Thank you.

smt88 12y ago
Newscombinator and the landing page are very difficult to read. There are lots of fonts that are too low-contrast or too small. There isn't lots of good visual separation between different elements. I don't want to get into a huge usability discussion right now, but it's important, and you should definitely look into it.
- tomw1808 12y ago
  Most definitely thankful for any comments on ux, as I'm a backed developer normally. :) it sometimes the blindness of the developer that needs different eyes to look at the project.. Will try to improve and impress, thank you.
- greggh 12y ago
  Everything smt88 just said. It is hard on the eyes, hard to read. The site itself actually looks like something I would read and share with everyone if the UI/UX issues get worked out.
  - tomw1808 12y ago
    Interesting, is there any specific font face or size that you'd recommend? I know ui/ux is always very subtle, but i have the feeling that there must be a golden standard and i miss that...
- tomw1808 12y ago
  So it be HN, increased the overall font-size and reduced the font-faces. Thank you.

ch215 12y ago

For me, neither website renders without javascript. A blank screen's a poor first impression. Maybe it's a pet peeve but I'm sure I'm not the only one who blocks JS by default. Also, making the panels on the right of the landing page opaque would aid readability.

tomw1808 12y ago
Thank you, I'll take is as a valuable feedback for the landingpage, which really needs some more improvement. Regarding the non-JS users. I am wondering how you can survive in the modern web. That shouldn't be meant as offensive statement, rather than I have the gut feeling that most websites are more like apps currently, running heavily on JS. That really makes me wonder...
- ch215 12y ago
  No offense taken. I use noscript to whitelist websites and grant temporary permissions to others as needed. To clarify, I have no problem with you using JS. I know I may have to enable it go gain functionality sometimes. My gripe is that on your sites I get zero functionality without it. I don't mean to cause offense either. Thought it may be something you hadn't considered is all.
  - tomw1808 12y ago
    You're absolutely right, I didn't consider it at all, shame on me, and a lot of shame. Actually, I didn't even think of it, although that is something I am almost praying when working with clients: make your sites at least usable without JS. Weird that I got caught there. Thank you.

tomw1808 12y ago

Let me give some more information. First, lesson learned, do not post on HN when tired. The ups and downs after posting are incredible, even if its just a private project. I couldn't be more thankful for the powerful emotions that arrive when I see my code in the open wild after weeks and months of coding. :) The tool here is "just a frontend" I've build as an API-sideproject of mine. So, what does it do? In one sentence: Newscombinator gathers news from different sources, downloads it, makes a screenshot, cleans it, natural language process it, and push it through a MySQL DB into a Solr index. The Solr-select handler is passed through a REST handler. Why that, why not directly the solr select handler? Because the REST handler also exposes endpoints to the MySQL Database. Some things are just not feasible in Solr alone. For example its hard to build aggregation queries in solr (think: SELECT AVG(points), SUM(points) FROM ... WHERE date_news_found ...), I've made that available in MySQL. And its easy to shift all that to a MariaDB cluster, or to an Amazon RDS, just in case... What is available here is a RESTful interface to a Solr-Index with all Hacker-News articles, selected Reddits, etc, starting from Oct 2014. That is around 200k of articles. Including searchable content. I think that is a good base to start with for me. Thank you in the meantime HN, I've learned something.