Ask HN: What do you need help with?
There have been a lot of awesome Offer HN threads recently. Since I'm sure there are a lot of people on HN who wouldn't mind helping someone out, I want to try something a little backwards.
What one thing do you need help with? Please be as specific as possible.
Let's also try to keep it somewhat hacker related (please don't ask for relationship advice or things like that). I'll do my best to help out as many people as I can.
15 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 42.4 ms ] threadI've posted it as a link before and got some good feedback. Not sure what the rules are on reposting after an update are.
- I think the auto-complete is tough to read due to a combination of the opacity (too opaque) and the center alignment. My suggestion (I'm not a designer so use your own judgement obviously): make the text on the auto-complete a little bigger, left align it, and make the background less opaque.
- The search options seem a little confusing to me. When searching by title, do I still enter ingredients? Why not just have a single search box with no options, just like Google?
- The default image (the refrigerator) looks ugly to me, when I first saw it I assumed that was an uploaded image for the dish. Sorry I don't really have any suggestions for this though other than a different default image.
Some comments
* I'm not sure if the word 'foodie' is well known
* I agree with the comment of the default fridge item - it's too busy
* There are not enough recipies / foodies per page because the icons are so big. On a big screen they are a little overwhelming.
* The grey / black main colour on the interface doesn't seem appetizing. Might be worthwhile experimenting with a few colours?
* I love the layout of the ingredients - very easy to read.
* I get question mark characters instead of the degree symbol.
* I see on the Homemade Chocolate Goodness Part 1 that there is a comment (which I assume is you) to allow ingredients to be listed in sections - I think this is a very important feature because it makes complicated recipes easier to read
* You have some escaping going on for user with profile 38 in the panel opposite the picture. See "At the end of the day"
* Perhaps give foodies the ability to not show the preparation column in the ingredients list as not very many of them use it - or else if there are no entries then don't render that column.
* The tags (main tag list) are difficult to read because they are alphabetical horizontally and not vertically
* Would be great to be able to search recipes by preparation time
I really like this site - definitely going to sign up and browse further! If I find anything else I'll comment again :)
* Yeah, you're not the first to comment about that. I've experimented with some others, but haven't found one that I like yet. I'll keep experimenting. Any ideas in that regard would be welcome -- I'm a programmer not a graphic designer.
* Hmm... I see your point. But I picked the size very intentionally. I wanted them to be larger so I had room to include all the information I needed while still allowing users to get a good solid look at the picture. I can certainly include more per page, and I can experiment with allowing more visible on the screen. But I don't want to shrink the image size. 300px x 300px is exactly where I wanted it. Of course, I'm always open to being convinced if it's an issue for lots of people. And I'll certainly keep it in mind an experiment with it.
* Yeah, I've done lots of experimenting with colors. But so far, the white on grey (Black at .8 opacity actually) works best. I'll keep experimenting. Again, I'm a programmer, not a designer :/
* Thanks! That's actually a recent update in response to feedback, so I can't really take credit for that one. But I'll pass it on ;)
* Yeah, not sure what's up with that. Might have something to do with improper escaping somewhere. I'll go hunting for it.
* Sections have already been implemented in the add and edit form. Just haven't gotten around to editing the recipes that were added before sections were implemented to use them.
* Yeah, that's not the only one. I haven't given the admin privileges to edit user profiles yet. I need to do that so I can fix it. The escaping is an artifact of a bug that's been fixed. I'll make a note to fix that profile, thanks!
* The ones that don't use it have preparation in the "amount" column - most of them. Because the preparation column wasn't available when they were added. Again, some editing will fix that.
* Completely agree on this one. Will work on it.
* Hmm... advanced search is in the works. Will include that. But a lot of recipes are lacking prep-time, so I don't know that it will be that effective. Maybe I can make prep time wiki-editable so that if the initial poster doesn't include, future users can.
Thanks for the comments and feedback! I really appreciate it. I'll keep all of it in mind.
For a Rails app, check out Heroku, they make admin stuff insanely simple (although they cost a little more, it's well worth the benefits). I'll let others chime in on Sinatra and Django.
How do things like memcached and Varnish fit into the picture and when is it an appropriate time to start worrying about it?
I'll take the easy part of this one (when to start worrying about it): In most cases, don't worry about it yet. You can get by just fine without either of them (especially Varnish) until you get a decent amount of users. Once you start seeing slowdowns, then start looking at how Memcached can help you cache data so you're not hitting your DB (or disk) as often.
I will get it online and update you all.
Just a thought.
I took up one of the offers for some proofing etc... and upon sending some info to the HN anon -- was informed that they could not help on my project as they are building something very similar.
So, if you have information/ideas that might be the slightest bit sensitive -- I would recommend you think about it closely before sending your information to random anons.