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Show HN: My Weekend Project, leftright.me

8 points by ecto ↗ HN
From inception Thursday night to near-feature-complete on Sunday morning, I consider it one of my better weekend hacking projects.

http://leftright.me/

I built it with node and Redis which was particularly fun. Redis truly is the AK-47 of databases.

This project has deeply engrained my longtime hate of Internet Explorer. Everything should be kosher in Chrome and FF but I had to make some compromises for IE.

I sent the link to a few friends and the userbase grew from there. It's not much but it's definitely something for having it live for a day.

I'm really looking forward to any constructive criticism you guys can throw my way. Thanks!

21 comments

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nolite
nice layout and design, esp for a weekend
ecto
Thanks, still trying to improve it. The settings page feels a little messy to me
nolite
I will say that having large forms at the right side of the page kind threw me off. Those kind of things, you expect more towards the center.

Current background, its not at all clear what that means

olegious
I'm usually very good at figuring out what an app does, but in this case I had to think about 20-30 seconds, that tells me that the explanation needs to be a bit clearer.

An interesting idea- I'll poke around and see what else I can say.

jw84
Well, I see two pictures and the words compare who's hotter instantly. It's for the lack of a better word a FaceMash, which itself is a clone of a few dozen other predecessors before it.

No further explanation needed. Your copy, however, needs work to compel me to bother spending 30 seconds to sign up and play with it.

olegious
I missed the "Who's hotter"- it is too small on my laptop screen ;). Maybe I'm in the minority on this one.
ecto
Was the features list not compelling, or simply too little?
olegious
No the features list was compelling, it is an interesting site. I just mean that when I first signed on, I didn't immediately "get" what it was about- maybe make the "who's hotter?" example from the 1st screenshot a bit more prominent or larger, because once you see that, the purpose of the site is self explanatory.
ecto
I intentionally never ask "who's hotter," only "who has the best picture." I want to avoid alienating people and still have some emotional strings
dotBen
link: http://leftright.me/

This site is basically a clone of something I believe OK Cupid offers, which is to let other users rate your photos to find the best profile picture. Based on their data blog it looks as though OKC let you pick some demographics of the people who vote on you too, which this site does't currently.

ecto
Thanks for letting me know about this. I wanted to stay away from making it a dating site but I think private messages would be a good feature to add.

I'm planning on adding some more granularity to the battles page if I ever get more users.

codeslush
This is kinda similar to a site I was thinking about doing - so you may as well port it and do it instead since you already have the codebase. The concept is "Who's the bigger douche" - pit Michael A. against Jason C. and so forth. :-)

Oh, good job - especially for a weekend project. Like others have stated, it wasn't immediately clear to me the function of the site at first.

ecto
Hhaha that's a great idea. You might enjoy the predecessor to this, http://mugshotwars.com/, though it's not my proudest creation.
codeslush
Love it! :-) Same concept as biggest douche, different audience.
icandoitbetter
The idea was hardly original in 2001. What made you start this in 2011?
ecto
Lack of employment.