If there's one thing it needs right now, it's a one sentence "What is KickPost?" blurb in the top-right somewhere. If I hadn't read the comments here I'd have assumed it was some sort of aggregator and moved on.
Hi<p>KickPost is new tech news aggregator that uses a predictive algorithm based on historically popular stories to predict which stories will be popular in realtime. We are about 20min faster at predicting hot stories than Techmeme.<p>What do you think?
This is way better than what I was working on[1]. Mine is still under development. I wanted to go after more of the top things being searched- i.e. Google Trends, Bing, Yahoo!, all that jazz- and somehow do something with that data. Along the lines I added Youtube popular list, Reddit, and other things.<p>I like it, wish you had an RSS feed. If you are going to want it to stick you are going to need a way for me to either a)share this content with my friends(twitter, facebook), b) let me comment on the stories you are giving me, c)let me bookmark these stories- there are tons of ways but right now I'm just reading. I'll keep checking back to see what you are doing. Great work!<p>[1]christopherwoodall.com/trendy
Please, please, please ditch the "disruptively scroll a huge chunk of page upon reaching the bottom" feature. Even if it does come bundled with the "show more content in a passive manner" feature, it's not worth it.<p>I'll gladly click to load more stories if it means I don't have to bear with the jarring effect of the page moving down a chunk while I scan stuff.<p>It works fine if you use a scrollwheel, but if you drag the scrollbar it is a horrible experience that I would not wish upon my greatest enemies.<p>Especially for content that is repetitive in design, I find dragging the scrollbar to be a more effective way to scan. I assume I'm not alone?
I propose a test. Set up a fake HN account, and use kickpost to submit stories. With a 20 minute head start, you should be the first poster on many stories. Later, you can reveal the account name for our amazement.
Great clean type! Love the non-fussy auto-loading at the bottom of the page too (is there some kind of fade-in happening there?).<p>I don't know if the italicized time of the post at the beginning of each blurb is useful, it feels like cruft when I am looking for information (I just skip over that piece). It also loses meaning lower down in the list (6:45PM 3 days ago? Do I care?)<p>Also: Have you played with de-emphasizing the time box on the left of each post somehow? Like, make it use muted colors unless :hovered?<p>I'd kill for an RSS reader that worked like this, though.
Looks great! I agree that there should be a blurb to the effect of "predicting hotness while it's still lukewarm," or something less lame but more informative. Do you use a form of Poisson regression, by any chance?
I'm interested to see it working during the weekday. This weekend is kind of dull for tech news. :-) Nice job though. I really like the simplicity.<p>I typically refresh the Techmeme page 10-20 times throughout the day. Does the KickPost page automatically pull down new posts, or do I have to refresh to get the latest news? Also, is there a list of blogs that you're pulling from? Thanks!
Great stuff.<p>I would make the headlines stronger than the rest.<p>Also I would play around with sizes. You might be able to squeeze it down a little and get more headlines at any given time.