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Show HN: soft-launching one of my pet projects

27 points by joshu ↗ HN
So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time.

I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/

Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think!

(Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)

25 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 68.8 ms ] thread
chrismiller
Looks good.

My one UI nitpick would be that clicking the "Read another random clue" button takes you to a random clue but that button is not present on the new page. I spent ~5 confused seconds looking for the button again before I noticed the link in the header. In my opinion the button should also be present on the clue page.

If you are looking for some content to get the site started Reddit recently had a huge thread full of hints and tips like this.

joshu
yeah, i've been going through those for good ones.
atgm
Agreed. I just want to sit here and click through clues, but the UI isn't very conducive to that.
fourstar
I actually have been working on this same idea of my own. Good to see there will be some competition. :)
il
I really like the site, but I'm turned off by the insistence on Twitter as the only way to interact with it.

Can I at least log in with Facebook? Gmail? OpenID?

It should also be possible to submit a new clue from any page, not just the homepage, I spent a little bit of time hunting for a submit button near the top of the page.

joshu
i'm starting with twitter for now, mostly because the API is the easiest for me to deal with...
JMiao
do you think you'll ask for email/password later on?
apu
Has the @ symbol now become the standard symbol for denoting a user's "homepage" on a site? I thought it was generally used to link directly to their twitter page?
apu
Bug: I was clicking random clue, and it worked fine for a few, but then I got: The webpage at http://cluedb.com/clue/7298Bb// has resulted in too many redirects.
joshu
yeah, there's some bad data. bug created!
ajju
I really like the site. I clicked "get random clue" enough times to get multiple repeats. Perhaps a "get next clue" is in order which a user can use to avoid repeats?

Also the "Read another random clue" button disappears after a couple of clues. I then have to click the random clue link at the top right which doesn't make a lot of sense.

joshu
Strange, I shall investigate.

There aren't that many clues in the system yet.

JMiao
clicking on "random clue" is unexpectedly satisfying.
azrealus
very cool. it would be nice to add categories or tags to clues. API would be nice too so maybe somebody else could create a mobile version :)
joshu
it does have tagging!
azrealus
oh sorry somehow I missed them
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jonpaul
Cool idea. Back button is broken.
HackrNwsDesignr
joshu: do you need any design help? would be happy to hack on a simple/elegant logo and/or design.
nandemo
It's a nice idea. I wish you had chosen another name, though. When I see ClueDB I think of a database product; I don't know what non-developers think of or if they'll remember the name.
jefe78
Two minor issues:

Clicked on "another random clue" after reading the first one. That disappeared on the following clues.

Having to use Twitter/any other common ID is going to cause people to shy away. Let me register for my own ID on your site.

Otherwise, I love the idea!

sibsibsib
Nice work. How are you liking the flask/mongo combination?
mapster
Fun! Wish the Read another clue would stay there so i can keep cruising along, but after 2 it disappears. Reading the comments is useful too. This is like a one big forum and we scroll through threads.