Hey everyone -- I wanted to run a project I have been working on for the last few months by the folks at Hacker News:<p>LINK: http://www.techofnow.com/<p>techofnow is an aggregator for technology memes -- similar to techmeme, although there are a few key differences. In particular, the method by which articles are clustered into memes and ranked is completely automated. This means an article which is considered important and promoted by an editor at techmeme may not be promoted on techofnow since it is not a significant meme.<p>A little background.<p>I started techofnow as a weekend project a few months ago after completing undergraduate (CS + Math) about a year ago. I thought building a meme aggregator would be a good challenge outside of work and graduate school to learn and maybe gain a little bootstrapped entrepreneurship experience.<p>Any feedback, thoughts, guidance, or criticism would be appreciated.
Some thoughts:<p>- Domain/name sounds somewhat awkward, which is not good for a place to get news.<p>- favicon looks rough.<p>- The front page is unfortunately a wreck, UI/UE-wise.<p>-- Don't use scrollover/hover to highlight part of main page name like some exciting link when it is just a link back to the main page.<p>-- Remove "Top Technology Memes". You don't need it.<p>-- Reduce unimportant UI elements by removing the icon next to where the link goes to and the site where the link goes to above each headline.<p>-- Story title on one line, text on the next. Don't start text on the headline line.<p>-- Text should probably not be in black because it is competing with the headline being blue and standing out. Pick one or the other to stand out if you must have both. I think the headline by itself is enough.<p>-- Get rid of the myriad of links to all the sites it came from under the headline and text.<p>What you have left unfortunately is a lackluster list of headlines, but basically- that is the gist of what you are providing currently. If you are trying to be google news, have categories, etc.<p>Why not pull content into the page dynamically via Ajax pushing the headlines down as soon as they come in?<p>Think about this: what is the feature (not content) that will distinguish you from every other site like this on the web?
I'm a noob when it comes to web design, but I think you'd be much better if you converted "Discussion" links into expandable form. They take up too much space, if a visitor is really interested in the sources that mention the news, they can click on the discussions and see the results.<p>Other than that it's a good idea, why don't you add Monthly/Weekly The Most Popular memes?
Beautiful. Absolutely Beautiful.<p>It would be wonderful if it was implemented here on HN. Instead of having a page full of "Angel-Gate" stories, there would be only one, and it would include all the others. Similar for every other duplicate submission.<p>At the moment, I believe HN has a very much simplified and inaccurate version of this concept implemented. If an exact url is submitted a second time, the second is simply added as a "vote up" for the previous submission of the same thing.
Actually to me it looks a lot like the tech/sci section of google news. I think in order to differentiate from them you need to add some more features, like tech related subcategories. Otherwise I would also look at them as a source of inspiration.
Hi, I am sorry.. I didn't get the difference between Techmeme & techofnow. can you elaborate more? may be I am too used to techmeme that I was seeing whether the "+" symbol comes up before the dicussion section. Also, you can probably show few discussions and show a link as "more discussion on the same topic"