9 ms·

Today I launched my solo project, Listry. Feedback/suggestions appreciated

174 points by Spines11 15y ago

JonLim 15y ago
Great so far! Very minimalistic and easy to navigate. Notice that you're using Google App Engine to send your welcome emails, and I'd love to offer you PostageApp (http://postageapp.com http://postageapp.com) while you're in beta. We'd be happy to help you out with that. :) Let me know, cheers!
Spines11 15y ago
This is the project I've been working on for the past 6 months. It combines the features of wikis with a voting system that determines the best parts of an article. There's still a lot of improvements I need to make, but I wanted to launch early and get feedback.
- darwindeeds 15y ago
  Agreed... launch early to get the actual users feedback!
- ayanb 15y ago
  Awesome work really, like the concept and totally love the speed of the site. Are you working on this full time?
  - Spines11 15y ago
    Thanks! I'm glad people are noticing the speed, I spent a ton of time on that :). Yep, working on it full-time.
stingraycharles 15y ago
Congratulations with your launch! It looks like you've got a nice hybrid between HN/Reddit-style voting and Stackoverflow-topics, - personally haven't seen such a site before. It'll be interesting to see whether you'll succeed building a community around it. Any plan-of-attacks on gaining traction?
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks! Yea, building the community will be the tough part. I was planning on writing high quality articles on Listry and then hopefully some of the people that read the article would want to add their own input to the article and that's how they would get started contributing. Any suggestions?
  - stingraycharles 15y ago
    I'm not sure, - that could be a way, but only if you actually enjoy writing those articles. Just thinking out loud, your time could also be spend editorially adding more and more subjects and quality lists. The whole problem with such a site is that you need to maintain some level of quality, which is best maintained by attracting people that care about that quality. If you have a lot of quality lists with quality subjects, the next thing you need to ensure is that Google (and other search engines) pick up on that. If I search for "emacs color themes", for example, you want listry to be the #1 match in Google with a list of links to color themes. That, and just balls: try to get some popular bloggers to cover your site. If they like the concept, they won't mind vouching for you.
  - davedx 15y ago
    Source articles from Wikipedia and Stackoverflow! As long as you attribute it should be fine, and a good way to build some content. Congrats, cool site :
davidcollantes 15y ago
Looks quite nice. Please implement OpenID, or similar. I do not want yet another account. Cheers!
- Spines11 15y ago
  Haha, okay. That'll be next on my TODO list :)
ch0wn 15y ago
Very interesting and - as far as I'm concerned - unique concept, clean design. I really like it so far. Best of luck!
rshm 15y ago
Prepare some seed content yourself. Just "listphrase" existing similar sites. It will give a bit of realness to new visitor. Cheers and best of luck.
techjohn 15y ago
Looks like you are using Google custom search. Can you please provide your perspective on the service.
- Spines11 15y ago
  It's very easy to set up, and it works alright. There is a delay for things to show up in the search results though. I think once app engine (which is what Listry runs on) implements full text search, I'll probably make my own solution using that.
arturadib 15y ago
Are votes really a 1-5 rating? I thought it was bit counterintuitive (I guess in my experience "votes" are typically binary). How about allowing just thumbs up/down?
- Spines11 15y ago
  From this being the top comment, it seems everyone agrees. I'll add it to my to-do list :)
  - Spines11 15y ago
    Should I keep the 5 star rating control for rating articles, and change the voting on items to thumbs up/down? Or should I change both the voting on items and voting on articles to thumbs up/down?
    - fuzzythinker 15y ago
      I don't see why they should be different. Consistency conveys simplicity.
    - chetan51 15y ago
      +1 for both thumbs up/down
    - tapvt 15y ago
      Both articles and items should have the up/down vote options, rather than the 5 star, IMO. There may be value in the determination of consumer-side article rank by a (weighted) average that encompasses both the net rank of items posted to the article + the rank of the article itself. I'm sure you've already thought about the item/article interaction in terms of effect on overall article ranking. UI/X-side, the effect (of ranking an item within an article) is unclear now, and I am fine with that as an early user. Moving forward, developing a ranking formula that weighs article rank against net rank of all of the article's items will be a usage-informed improvement that provides great value to users. That ranking formula, as well as making the result of a "ranking" interaction obvious to the user, will help the understanding of how such interactions work. With a social answering/ranking/voting application, creation of, and/or tweaks to, the formula that determines the effect of interactions will have a huge influence in shaping the culture of the individuals that interact with the application.
ldh 15y ago
At least at this early stage with little content, the site seems very snappy. Looking at the blog, I'm assuming you're running on Google AppEngine? Can you give us an overview of how the site is implemented?
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks for noticing the speed :) I spent a lot of effort on that. I built my own mini-framework for Google App Engine with a focus on speed. The main thing that makes it fast is that it utilizes public edge caching for most content, and the parts of the content that change from user to user are updated with javascript. So with the home page, App Engine just serves a static page from it's edge cache, which is updated every 30 seconds, and the top bar of the site which is different if you are logged in is updated with javascript to show you different links if you are logged in.
  - bdesimone 15y ago
    God damn. The site really is fast. Well done.
  - drjoem 15y ago
    cool
btw0 15y ago
Nice idea and good implementation! The home page could look cleaner if you use less bold font-style and a smaller number of different font-sizes.
jeff_5nines 15y ago
This is a really cool application. How do you intend on keeping out crap article and malicious updates? Either way, this is a nicely designed interface and great idea.
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks :) For crap articles, people can vote them down, which will move them lower on the new articles tab and popular articles tab if they are voted low enough. Also, I can manually delete obviously crap articles, or close articles that don't fit the format. For crap edits, they can be undone in the history tab of each article. I need to do a little work in making rollbacks easier though. If I get a lot of traffic, I'll have to write some software to help identify malicious edits.
  - darwindeeds 15y ago
    Oh man. You are going to get a lot of traffic. Please do something to block a spammer's ip. Have a flag button and do a soft delete it after a certain number of flags. Soft delete because you can review to make sure its actually crap and not the top item in your page :) Good luck
    - Spines11 15y ago
      I just felt the need for that a few minutes ago, a troll overwrote all of the articles with junk text, and I had no way to easily block his IP. I'll be working on that ASAP.
Simucal 15y ago
Congrats on the launch. I'm curious how your "popular" tab works. If it is simply sorted by votes with no time-component then your going to have the same "self-fulfilling prophecy" problem that Stack Overflow had when they first launched.
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks! Right now the popular tab sorts things based on the votes for the article, and also the votes for the items within the article. So an article with good items can rank higher than an article with more votes, but no items. Right now there isn't any time-component to the popular articles. I was thinking of having sub-tabs for "popular this week", "popular this month", and "popular all time", and then having the default be "popular this month".
asadjb 15y ago
Congrats on launching. From what I've seen in my brief tour of the site, it's a unique idea. I agree with stingraycharles that it's a nice and unique hybrid b/w Reddit and StackOverflow. Best of luck!
avgarrison 15y ago
For some reason the proxy server at my work is blocking your website with the message "Virus detected and blocked" and McAfee reports it as having Medium risk: http://www.mcafee.com/threat-intelligence/domain/default.aspx?domain=www.listry.com http://www.mcafee.com/threat-intelligence/domain/default.asp...
- Spines11 15y ago
  Hmm, thanks for the heads up, I'll have to look into that. I don't know what would be causing that.
  - avgarrison 15y ago
    Ya, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, I know this is the last thing you want to hear on launch day!
viandante 15y ago
Only problem I see is incentive to write on your website. People write on SOF or HN for reputation, why should they write on listry?
- Spines11 15y ago
  One reason could be if you wished there was good resource on a topic. For example, if you wanted to convince someone that they should develop for iOS instead of android, you could start an article on Listry titled "Reasons to develop for iOS". Then add a few reasons of your own to the article, and then other Listry users could add their reasons, everyone would vote on the best reasons, and then in the end you would have a good resource of all the best reasons to develop for iOS. A reputation system would definitely be a good thing to have too. I was thinking about creating one, but decided to launch early, and then improve the site over time.
StylusEater 15y ago
Congratulations on launching a Beta! The site is visually pleasing and the layout works. I noticed one small detail that is jarring and it should be a simple style fix. The location of content contained in a div or span shifts when you change categories on the "New Articles" tab. You should be able to see what I mean by selecting "New Articles" then watching the Listry icon in the upper left move to the right (or left) after selecting another category from the list.
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks :). I see what you are talking about, it's because the main page is long enough to have a scrollbar, and then when you choose a category, there isn't enough content to need to show a scrollbar, right?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
eyko 15y ago
Yet another web app that solves #firstworldproblems…
- kadabra9 15y ago
  yet another douchebag with nothing constructive at all to add or any real feedback in for a member who started this thread explicitly to obtain feedback from HN
losvedir 15y ago
Very nice. At first, I didn't really see the point of it - another voting/wiki type thing, sigh - but the interface is so fast and compelling that it just drew me in. I registered so I could vote on something, decided to see what creating an article was like, and it was so smooth it made me want to start more, and then eventually realize I have been looking for something like this. I started a list of "Coffee shops in Cambridge, MA" because I remembered that I had been looking for just such a list the other day. I figured it's mostly HN users on there now, probably, and a fair amount of us are from here. I'm not positive what types of lists you're wanting, though, so I won't be hurt if you delete it! Feature request: I would love to add some simple custom attribute to each list. For instance, with the coffee shops, it'd be nice if I could define an attribute for that list of "Free wifi?" and then each item could select either yes/no as it's created. An article on vim color themes could define an attribute of "Background?" with options "light, dark, both". At some point in the future, then, you could filter and look at just the items in the list that match an attribute. E.g., I can look at the coffee shops and filter to look at only the ones that give free wifi. Great work!
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks! I really appreciate your support :) Your other article, "Best Text Editors for Programming", is a perfect article for Listry I think. The Cambridge coffee shops one would be good if there were a lot of Listry users that lived in Cambridge and could vote on it, I'm not sure there are enough though. Your feature request is a good idea, I'll keep it in mind for down the road.
- mbyrne 15y ago
  side note: losvedir, if you actually are interested in Cambridge Coffee Shops for startups, check out http://hcombine.com/22/hcombine-start-up-coffee-shops/ http://hcombine.com/22/hcombine-start-up-coffee-shops/
  - losvedir 15y ago
    Hey, that looks great. Thanks!
darwindeeds 15y ago
Great idea Kyle. How are you going to clean up spams? I like that its open but if one person decides to spam you will have lot of clean ups to do.
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks! Spam edits can be reverted in the history tab, there's still more work I need to do to make that easier though. Spam articles can be voted down, and that will take them off the front pages, and I can manually delete them. I'll probably need to have a "flag article" link down the road though.
generators 15y ago
well design application. can you share what technology you are using ? python or java ? backbone or knockout ? and experience with app engine. and, if I am not mistaken, blog is being served using same application that serve listry ?, would not saparate subdomain is good idea ?
fuzzythinker 15y ago
I like its smoothness and workflow, like others have point out. Enjoy starting w/o forcing account creation as well. After entering my abridged version of stackexchange's public web site checklist (http://www.listry.com/list/96005/live-app-checklist http://www.listry.com/list/96005/live-app-checklist), I can see 2 features that I like to see: - Allow entering just the "details" part of an article Item. Current workflow restricts articles to be more of a sub-level categorization. For simple lists that the article title already describes the article, there's no reason to require an item title. - Allow option to auto insert list bullets/numbers into text that separated by empty lines.
Lukebream 15y ago
Cool app. One method of getting quality lists created is to offer bloggers a backlink in return for creating good lists. This has 2 effects they are more likely to create a list. They are also more likely to promote it/ write about you/ their list as they will want to improve the seo benefit of the backlink you have given them. Have to bear in mind that you will get some spam and so you need to be ontop of moderation.
yesimahuman 15y ago
I think you can get rid of the password confirm on the popup (you have their email after all for resets). Could make voting a bit more fluid.
jorde 15y ago
Nice app and congrats for the launch! I'm into list based services but there aren't too many around. One really similar that I came across about an year ago was http://listiki.com/ http://listiki.com/ I really like their wiki/fork-style approach.
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks :) I've seen that site before. Mine's more about creating comprehensive articles rather than just a list. Something where each item of the article has paragraph(s) of detail. Something like Paul Graham's article, "18 Mistakes that Kill Startups" (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) would be an ideal Listry article.
plq 15y ago
congrats on launching! why not eat your own dog food and start a [sticky] list for feature requests? i think it'd be a nice way to get early adopters get hooked up.
capdiz 15y ago
Very good idea. At least each edit made to a story will have to be voted upon.
ctdonath 15y ago
Blocked as "spam/suspicious".
jijoy 15y ago
Congrats. Very nice UI man . wishes all the best
cadr 15y ago
One thing I noticed was that under the 'best text editors' list, Vim shows up multiple times. Would be nice for it to know to combine or something. Pretty!
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks, that happened because a troll overwrote the entry for Vim with junk text, and then the people added vim because they didn't see it. I've manually merged their entries with the main vim entry.
zmt 15y ago
Nice and very fast. Could you give us more info on what stack did you use to develop/deploy this?
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks :) It's developed with the dynamic language Groovy, on Google App Engine. Here's a comment with some more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803
barmstrong 15y ago
Site looks great. This is pretty similar to an idea i had a few years back: http://buyersvote.com/categories http://buyersvote.com/categories It has languished since and never took off, but the pieces were all there: user generated listed, votes, wiki style edits, comments etc. I've had some time to think on why mine never took off and wanted to share a few ideas in case it helps. - critical mass is hard, StackOverflow (my inspiration for it) was able to launch with two massive blog posts from influencers - how to counteract this? either empower your users to create their own "sub-listries" and try to attract influencers - or do the bowling pin strategy http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/ http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/ - or do the tripadvisor approach (read Founders At Work for this story) and spend massively to seed content for several years to reach critical mass on your own Few other thoughts: - I think your design is better - Is "Articles" the right word here? Esp given your domain would "lists" work better? Hope it helps!
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks for your advice and compliments :) I was debating between calling them "lists" or "articles", and decided on "articles" because my hope is that over time they will become full-fledged articles (true that my domain name makes that a bit confusing). Paul Graham's article on "the 18 mistakes that kill startups" (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) is the type of article I am shooting for with Listry. Where each item of the article has 1 or more in-depth paragraphs of explanation or details.
ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
1 little thing -> Your "Browse Popular Articles" and "Contribute to New Articles" buttons are not vertically centered. The white space above them is 6px less than the white space below. It looks like you wanted them to be the same in your css but the #mainbuttons is 65px in height and the buttons are 59px in height. If you change #mainbuttons height to 59px and bump the margins a little bit more to 29 or 30px you get a nicer look I personally think. A little bit more white space separates the buttons from the top header and to me is easier on the eyes. I really like the site thought. There's lots of these but yours is different, the content stands out more than the site, and to me that's what matters.
moe 15y ago
Small tip: shrink the registration-barrier. 1. Add those social login buttons (facebook, twitter) 2. Make "e-mail address" the only input field, then mail me a password. 3. Delay asking me for a display-name until I try an operation that needs it.
jackreichert 15y ago
Congratts! Great idea and implementation! Clean, quick, nice! One design tweak I would do... Have the descriptions of the lists collapsable so the reader can skim the list and only get the full scroll effect if they need.
sgerrand 15y ago
Kudos on a well implemented use of AppEngine - It's really zippy. Do you have any plans to write a technical overview of your implementation?
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks. I'll probably write about the implementation once I get some spare time. I got a lot of great feedback today that I'll be busy implementing for a while :)
wiradikusuma 15y ago
hey man this is slick, congrats! btw just curiuos, what's your underlying tech stack, your website is lightning fast! (given the fact i live in SE asia where internet quality is crappy)
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks :) It uses my own mini-framework for Google App Engine. This comment has more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803
cturner 15y ago
I'm using firefox. For some reason when I'm on the text editor page, text navigation like space, pageup, pagedown and end don't work.
pacifika 15y ago
I'm trying to subscribe to your blog but I cannot find a feed?
- Spines11 15y ago
  Ah, didn't implement that yet. I'll get to work on that :)
bnegreve 15y ago
Do you have any plan to deal with non disjoint items... that would be an interesting problem to solve. eg, you have the following : emacs 30 vim 20 vi 15
rbreve 15y ago
Cool, I had a similar idea a while back, http://lightsalad.com http://lightsalad.com it never took off, and I abandoned the project. Good luck
SudarshanP 15y ago
Nice Site. Feature request: For each list allow users to link to lists in the wild. For Eg there could be a 10 reasons to quit smoking on some magazine. The user may not want to recreate the list, but just provide a bookmark. You could even provide a "listify" bookmarklet. For Eg Paul Graham's list of reasons why startups fail and a lot of startup failure story post mortems could be Supplimentary materials for a list of the same name. The list which begins life as a list of useful bookmarks to external lists about the same topic could over time be deduplicated by the community to create a Master list that would be much more useful than the external lists themselves.
SudarshanP 15y ago
I tried starting a list of "shops in india that would be of interest to Hackers and Makers": http://www.listry.com/list/83050/list-of-shops-in-india-that-are-interesting-to-hackers-makers http://www.listry.com/list/83050/list-of-shops-in-india-that... on the lines of "Coffee shops in Cambridge, MA"... And I added two shops that I had painstaking discovered a few months ago for buying a few things I needed. I was a bit annoyed that getting things you want from your own country(minimizes shipping and taxes) is still so hard in the era of google. So I wanted to share it with the world hoping that others would populate the list further and I could benefit from this. But it was voted -2. Now I have no complaints against that... Maybe such a list is unsuitable for this type of site. But I think it may be a smarter idea for you to make it more obvious as to what constitutes a bad list. Why "Coffee shops in Campridge" is kosher and why "Shops interesting for hackers in India" is not.
- Spines11 15y ago
  Hi SudarshanP, I voted you down because I thought it was spam, sorry. I've undone my vote now so you are back to 0. When I voted there was just one item with a link, and it looked like someone just wanted to advertise their online store. Your article seems fine for the site. An optimum article would be more than just a list of links though. Ideally, I want articles to become full-fledged, comprehensive articles. Like the article for "Reasons to Quit Smoking". In time, I hope that article can become a comprehensive resource of all the best reasons to quit smoking. Then someone who is trying to quit smoking can use that article as motivation to quit. I'll be working on a commenting system so that in the future it'll be easier to discuss this type of thing on the actual article page. Thanks for trying out the site and providing feedback! And sorry again for thinking it was spam.

174 points by Spines11 15y ago

Great so far! Very minimalistic and easy to navigate. Notice that you're using Google App Engine to send your welcome emails, and I'd love to offer you PostageApp (http://postageapp.com http://postageapp.com) while you're in beta. We'd be happy to help you out with that. :) Let me know, cheers!

Spines11 15y ago

This is the project I've been working on for the past 6 months. It combines the features of wikis with a voting system that determines the best parts of an article. There's still a lot of improvements I need to make, but I wanted to launch early and get feedback.

darwindeeds 15y ago
Agreed... launch early to get the actual users feedback!
ayanb 15y ago
Awesome work really, like the concept and totally love the speed of the site. Are you working on this full time?
- Spines11 15y ago
  Thanks! I'm glad people are noticing the speed, I spent a ton of time on that :). Yep, working on it full-time.

stingraycharles 15y ago

Congratulations with your launch! It looks like you've got a nice hybrid between HN/Reddit-style voting and Stackoverflow-topics, - personally haven't seen such a site before. It'll be interesting to see whether you'll succeed building a community around it. Any plan-of-attacks on gaining traction?

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks! Yea, building the community will be the tough part. I was planning on writing high quality articles on Listry and then hopefully some of the people that read the article would want to add their own input to the article and that's how they would get started contributing. Any suggestions?
- stingraycharles 15y ago
  I'm not sure, - that could be a way, but only if you actually enjoy writing those articles. Just thinking out loud, your time could also be spend editorially adding more and more subjects and quality lists. The whole problem with such a site is that you need to maintain some level of quality, which is best maintained by attracting people that care about that quality. If you have a lot of quality lists with quality subjects, the next thing you need to ensure is that Google (and other search engines) pick up on that. If I search for "emacs color themes", for example, you want listry to be the #1 match in Google with a list of links to color themes. That, and just balls: try to get some popular bloggers to cover your site. If they like the concept, they won't mind vouching for you.
- davedx 15y ago
  Source articles from Wikipedia and Stackoverflow! As long as you attribute it should be fine, and a good way to build some content. Congrats, cool site :

davidcollantes 15y ago

Looks quite nice. Please implement OpenID, or similar. I do not want yet another account. Cheers!

Spines11 15y ago
Haha, okay. That'll be next on my TODO list :)

ch0wn 15y ago

Very interesting and - as far as I'm concerned - unique concept, clean design. I really like it so far. Best of luck!

rshm 15y ago

Prepare some seed content yourself. Just "listphrase" existing similar sites. It will give a bit of realness to new visitor. Cheers and best of luck.

techjohn 15y ago

Looks like you are using Google custom search. Can you please provide your perspective on the service.

Spines11 15y ago
It's very easy to set up, and it works alright. There is a delay for things to show up in the search results though. I think once app engine (which is what Listry runs on) implements full text search, I'll probably make my own solution using that.

arturadib 15y ago

Are votes really a 1-5 rating? I thought it was bit counterintuitive (I guess in my experience "votes" are typically binary). How about allowing just thumbs up/down?

Spines11 15y ago
From this being the top comment, it seems everyone agrees. I'll add it to my to-do list :)
- Spines11 15y ago
  Should I keep the 5 star rating control for rating articles, and change the voting on items to thumbs up/down? Or should I change both the voting on items and voting on articles to thumbs up/down?
  - fuzzythinker 15y ago
    I don't see why they should be different. Consistency conveys simplicity.
  - chetan51 15y ago
    +1 for both thumbs up/down
  - tapvt 15y ago
    Both articles and items should have the up/down vote options, rather than the 5 star, IMO. There may be value in the determination of consumer-side article rank by a (weighted) average that encompasses both the net rank of items posted to the article + the rank of the article itself. I'm sure you've already thought about the item/article interaction in terms of effect on overall article ranking. UI/X-side, the effect (of ranking an item within an article) is unclear now, and I am fine with that as an early user. Moving forward, developing a ranking formula that weighs article rank against net rank of all of the article's items will be a usage-informed improvement that provides great value to users. That ranking formula, as well as making the result of a "ranking" interaction obvious to the user, will help the understanding of how such interactions work. With a social answering/ranking/voting application, creation of, and/or tweaks to, the formula that determines the effect of interactions will have a huge influence in shaping the culture of the individuals that interact with the application.

ldh 15y ago

At least at this early stage with little content, the site seems very snappy. Looking at the blog, I'm assuming you're running on Google AppEngine? Can you give us an overview of how the site is implemented?

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks for noticing the speed :) I spent a lot of effort on that. I built my own mini-framework for Google App Engine with a focus on speed. The main thing that makes it fast is that it utilizes public edge caching for most content, and the parts of the content that change from user to user are updated with javascript. So with the home page, App Engine just serves a static page from it's edge cache, which is updated every 30 seconds, and the top bar of the site which is different if you are logged in is updated with javascript to show you different links if you are logged in.
- bdesimone 15y ago
  God damn. The site really is fast. Well done.
- drjoem 15y ago
  cool

btw0 15y ago

Nice idea and good implementation! The home page could look cleaner if you use less bold font-style and a smaller number of different font-sizes.

jeff_5nines 15y ago

This is a really cool application. How do you intend on keeping out crap article and malicious updates? Either way, this is a nicely designed interface and great idea.

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks :) For crap articles, people can vote them down, which will move them lower on the new articles tab and popular articles tab if they are voted low enough. Also, I can manually delete obviously crap articles, or close articles that don't fit the format. For crap edits, they can be undone in the history tab of each article. I need to do a little work in making rollbacks easier though. If I get a lot of traffic, I'll have to write some software to help identify malicious edits.
- darwindeeds 15y ago
  Oh man. You are going to get a lot of traffic. Please do something to block a spammer's ip. Have a flag button and do a soft delete it after a certain number of flags. Soft delete because you can review to make sure its actually crap and not the top item in your page :) Good luck
  - Spines11 15y ago
    I just felt the need for that a few minutes ago, a troll overwrote all of the articles with junk text, and I had no way to easily block his IP. I'll be working on that ASAP.

Simucal 15y ago

Congrats on the launch. I'm curious how your "popular" tab works. If it is simply sorted by votes with no time-component then your going to have the same "self-fulfilling prophecy" problem that Stack Overflow had when they first launched.

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks! Right now the popular tab sorts things based on the votes for the article, and also the votes for the items within the article. So an article with good items can rank higher than an article with more votes, but no items. Right now there isn't any time-component to the popular articles. I was thinking of having sub-tabs for "popular this week", "popular this month", and "popular all time", and then having the default be "popular this month".

asadjb 15y ago

Congrats on launching. From what I've seen in my brief tour of the site, it's a unique idea. I agree with stingraycharles that it's a nice and unique hybrid b/w Reddit and StackOverflow. Best of luck!

avgarrison 15y ago

For some reason the proxy server at my work is blocking your website with the message "Virus detected and blocked" and McAfee reports it as having Medium risk: http://www.mcafee.com/threat-intelligence/domain/default.aspx?domain=www.listry.com http://www.mcafee.com/threat-intelligence/domain/default.asp...

Spines11 15y ago
Hmm, thanks for the heads up, I'll have to look into that. I don't know what would be causing that.
- avgarrison 15y ago
  Ya, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, I know this is the last thing you want to hear on launch day!

viandante 15y ago

Only problem I see is incentive to write on your website. People write on SOF or HN for reputation, why should they write on listry?

Spines11 15y ago
One reason could be if you wished there was good resource on a topic. For example, if you wanted to convince someone that they should develop for iOS instead of android, you could start an article on Listry titled "Reasons to develop for iOS". Then add a few reasons of your own to the article, and then other Listry users could add their reasons, everyone would vote on the best reasons, and then in the end you would have a good resource of all the best reasons to develop for iOS. A reputation system would definitely be a good thing to have too. I was thinking about creating one, but decided to launch early, and then improve the site over time.

StylusEater 15y ago

Congratulations on launching a Beta! The site is visually pleasing and the layout works. I noticed one small detail that is jarring and it should be a simple style fix. The location of content contained in a div or span shifts when you change categories on the "New Articles" tab. You should be able to see what I mean by selecting "New Articles" then watching the Listry icon in the upper left move to the right (or left) after selecting another category from the list.

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks :). I see what you are talking about, it's because the main page is long enough to have a scrollbar, and then when you choose a category, there isn't enough content to need to show a scrollbar, right?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

eyko 15y ago

Yet another web app that solves #firstworldproblems…

kadabra9 15y ago
yet another douchebag with nothing constructive at all to add or any real feedback in for a member who started this thread explicitly to obtain feedback from HN

losvedir 15y ago

Very nice. At first, I didn't really see the point of it - another voting/wiki type thing, sigh - but the interface is so fast and compelling that it just drew me in. I registered so I could vote on something, decided to see what creating an article was like, and it was so smooth it made me want to start more, and then eventually realize I have been looking for something like this. I started a list of "Coffee shops in Cambridge, MA" because I remembered that I had been looking for just such a list the other day. I figured it's mostly HN users on there now, probably, and a fair amount of us are from here. I'm not positive what types of lists you're wanting, though, so I won't be hurt if you delete it! Feature request: I would love to add some simple custom attribute to each list. For instance, with the coffee shops, it'd be nice if I could define an attribute for that list of "Free wifi?" and then each item could select either yes/no as it's created. An article on vim color themes could define an attribute of "Background?" with options "light, dark, both". At some point in the future, then, you could filter and look at just the items in the list that match an attribute. E.g., I can look at the coffee shops and filter to look at only the ones that give free wifi. Great work!

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks! I really appreciate your support :) Your other article, "Best Text Editors for Programming", is a perfect article for Listry I think. The Cambridge coffee shops one would be good if there were a lot of Listry users that lived in Cambridge and could vote on it, I'm not sure there are enough though. Your feature request is a good idea, I'll keep it in mind for down the road.
mbyrne 15y ago
side note: losvedir, if you actually are interested in Cambridge Coffee Shops for startups, check out http://hcombine.com/22/hcombine-start-up-coffee-shops/ http://hcombine.com/22/hcombine-start-up-coffee-shops/
- losvedir 15y ago
  Hey, that looks great. Thanks!

darwindeeds 15y ago

Great idea Kyle. How are you going to clean up spams? I like that its open but if one person decides to spam you will have lot of clean ups to do.

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks! Spam edits can be reverted in the history tab, there's still more work I need to do to make that easier though. Spam articles can be voted down, and that will take them off the front pages, and I can manually delete them. I'll probably need to have a "flag article" link down the road though.

generators 15y ago

well design application. can you share what technology you are using ? python or java ? backbone or knockout ? and experience with app engine. and, if I am not mistaken, blog is being served using same application that serve listry ?, would not saparate subdomain is good idea ?

fuzzythinker 15y ago

I like its smoothness and workflow, like others have point out. Enjoy starting w/o forcing account creation as well. After entering my abridged version of stackexchange's public web site checklist (http://www.listry.com/list/96005/live-app-checklist http://www.listry.com/list/96005/live-app-checklist), I can see 2 features that I like to see: - Allow entering just the "details" part of an article Item. Current workflow restricts articles to be more of a sub-level categorization. For simple lists that the article title already describes the article, there's no reason to require an item title. - Allow option to auto insert list bullets/numbers into text that separated by empty lines.

Lukebream 15y ago

Cool app. One method of getting quality lists created is to offer bloggers a backlink in return for creating good lists. This has 2 effects they are more likely to create a list. They are also more likely to promote it/ write about you/ their list as they will want to improve the seo benefit of the backlink you have given them. Have to bear in mind that you will get some spam and so you need to be ontop of moderation.

yesimahuman 15y ago

I think you can get rid of the password confirm on the popup (you have their email after all for resets). Could make voting a bit more fluid.

jorde 15y ago

Nice app and congrats for the launch! I'm into list based services but there aren't too many around. One really similar that I came across about an year ago was http://listiki.com/ http://listiki.com/ I really like their wiki/fork-style approach.

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks :) I've seen that site before. Mine's more about creating comprehensive articles rather than just a list. Something where each item of the article has paragraph(s) of detail. Something like Paul Graham's article, "18 Mistakes that Kill Startups" (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) would be an ideal Listry article.

plq 15y ago

congrats on launching! why not eat your own dog food and start a [sticky] list for feature requests? i think it'd be a nice way to get early adopters get hooked up.

capdiz 15y ago

Very good idea. At least each edit made to a story will have to be voted upon.

ctdonath 15y ago

Blocked as "spam/suspicious".

jijoy 15y ago

Congrats. Very nice UI man . wishes all the best

cadr 15y ago

One thing I noticed was that under the 'best text editors' list, Vim shows up multiple times. Would be nice for it to know to combine or something. Pretty!

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks, that happened because a troll overwrote the entry for Vim with junk text, and then the people added vim because they didn't see it. I've manually merged their entries with the main vim entry.

zmt 15y ago

Nice and very fast. Could you give us more info on what stack did you use to develop/deploy this?

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks :) It's developed with the dynamic language Groovy, on Google App Engine. Here's a comment with some more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803

barmstrong 15y ago

Site looks great. This is pretty similar to an idea i had a few years back: http://buyersvote.com/categories http://buyersvote.com/categories It has languished since and never took off, but the pieces were all there: user generated listed, votes, wiki style edits, comments etc. I've had some time to think on why mine never took off and wanted to share a few ideas in case it helps. - critical mass is hard, StackOverflow (my inspiration for it) was able to launch with two massive blog posts from influencers - how to counteract this? either empower your users to create their own "sub-listries" and try to attract influencers - or do the bowling pin strategy http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/ http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/ - or do the tripadvisor approach (read Founders At Work for this story) and spend massively to seed content for several years to reach critical mass on your own Few other thoughts: - I think your design is better - Is "Articles" the right word here? Esp given your domain would "lists" work better? Hope it helps!

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks for your advice and compliments :) I was debating between calling them "lists" or "articles", and decided on "articles" because my hope is that over time they will become full-fledged articles (true that my domain name makes that a bit confusing). Paul Graham's article on "the 18 mistakes that kill startups" (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) is the type of article I am shooting for with Listry. Where each item of the article has 1 or more in-depth paragraphs of explanation or details.

ChrisNorstrom 15y ago

1 little thing -> Your "Browse Popular Articles" and "Contribute to New Articles" buttons are not vertically centered. The white space above them is 6px less than the white space below. It looks like you wanted them to be the same in your css but the #mainbuttons is 65px in height and the buttons are 59px in height. If you change #mainbuttons height to 59px and bump the margins a little bit more to 29 or 30px you get a nicer look I personally think. A little bit more white space separates the buttons from the top header and to me is easier on the eyes. I really like the site thought. There's lots of these but yours is different, the content stands out more than the site, and to me that's what matters.

moe 15y ago

Small tip: shrink the registration-barrier. 1. Add those social login buttons (facebook, twitter) 2. Make "e-mail address" the only input field, then mail me a password. 3. Delay asking me for a display-name until I try an operation that needs it.

jackreichert 15y ago

Congratts! Great idea and implementation! Clean, quick, nice! One design tweak I would do... Have the descriptions of the lists collapsable so the reader can skim the list and only get the full scroll effect if they need.

sgerrand 15y ago

Kudos on a well implemented use of AppEngine - It's really zippy. Do you have any plans to write a technical overview of your implementation?

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks. I'll probably write about the implementation once I get some spare time. I got a lot of great feedback today that I'll be busy implementing for a while :)

wiradikusuma 15y ago

hey man this is slick, congrats! btw just curiuos, what's your underlying tech stack, your website is lightning fast! (given the fact i live in SE asia where internet quality is crappy)

Spines11 15y ago
Thanks :) It uses my own mini-framework for Google App Engine. This comment has more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803

cturner 15y ago

I'm using firefox. For some reason when I'm on the text editor page, text navigation like space, pageup, pagedown and end don't work.

pacifika 15y ago

I'm trying to subscribe to your blog but I cannot find a feed?

Spines11 15y ago
Ah, didn't implement that yet. I'll get to work on that :)

bnegreve 15y ago

Do you have any plan to deal with non disjoint items... that would be an interesting problem to solve. eg, you have the following : emacs 30 vim 20 vi 15

rbreve 15y ago

Cool, I had a similar idea a while back, http://lightsalad.com http://lightsalad.com it never took off, and I abandoned the project. Good luck

SudarshanP 15y ago

Nice Site. Feature request: For each list allow users to link to lists in the wild. For Eg there could be a 10 reasons to quit smoking on some magazine. The user may not want to recreate the list, but just provide a bookmark. You could even provide a "listify" bookmarklet. For Eg Paul Graham's list of reasons why startups fail and a lot of startup failure story post mortems could be Supplimentary materials for a list of the same name. The list which begins life as a list of useful bookmarks to external lists about the same topic could over time be deduplicated by the community to create a Master list that would be much more useful than the external lists themselves.

SudarshanP 15y ago

I tried starting a list of "shops in india that would be of interest to Hackers and Makers": http://www.listry.com/list/83050/list-of-shops-in-india-that-are-interesting-to-hackers-makers http://www.listry.com/list/83050/list-of-shops-in-india-that... on the lines of "Coffee shops in Cambridge, MA"... And I added two shops that I had painstaking discovered a few months ago for buying a few things I needed. I was a bit annoyed that getting things you want from your own country(minimizes shipping and taxes) is still so hard in the era of google. So I wanted to share it with the world hoping that others would populate the list further and I could benefit from this. But it was voted -2. Now I have no complaints against that... Maybe such a list is unsuitable for this type of site. But I think it may be a smarter idea for you to make it more obvious as to what constitutes a bad list. Why "Coffee shops in Campridge" is kosher and why "Shops interesting for hackers in India" is not.

Spines11 15y ago
Hi SudarshanP, I voted you down because I thought it was spam, sorry. I've undone my vote now so you are back to 0. When I voted there was just one item with a link, and it looked like someone just wanted to advertise their online store. Your article seems fine for the site. An optimum article would be more than just a list of links though. Ideally, I want articles to become full-fledged, comprehensive articles. Like the article for "Reasons to Quit Smoking". In time, I hope that article can become a comprehensive resource of all the best reasons to quit smoking. Then someone who is trying to quit smoking can use that article as motivation to quit. I'll be working on a commenting system so that in the future it'll be easier to discuss this type of thing on the actual article page. Thanks for trying out the site and providing feedback! And sorry again for thinking it was spam.