HN Explorer

Show HN: Our weekend project - HN Showcase, browse "Show HN" posts

63 points by ssong ↗ HN
http://www.hnshowcase.com

Moses (nnythm) and I browse Hacker News daily. Show HN posts are some of our favorite parts of HN. We wanted to create a way to browse Show HN articles, even those that might not quite make it to the front page. We created http://www.hnshowcase.com last weekend to make discovering projects posted on HN easier. It searches all "Show HN" posts and generates a thumbnail view for each of them. You can sort by submission date, points, and number of comments, and navigate with left/right or j/k keys.

We used the following technologies:

HN Search API, Pyramid web framework, jQuery, url2png and thumbalizr for thumbnail generation, and dotCloud for hosting.

Let us know what you think and how we can improve the user experience!

18 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 46.4 ms ] thread
slater
Nothing much to add except that it's a great idea, and really nice-looking implementation.
tobin
Very slick! I like it a lot (: anything to improve HN is a + for me!
karlzt
why is this better than searching "show hn" on hnsearch?
ssong
hnsearch is certainly a great way to find the same information, and in fact we use it underneath to get our data. However, going through hnsearch requires a few steps and many casual readers might not bother to go there. Since most "Show HN" posts link to the project homepage, we hope that displaying a thumbnail of each page in a visual gallery can help views discover interesting content faster.
karmalizer
Nice!

Someone should make a website linking all the little improvements like this people have made to HN.

EDIT: When I'm on page 2 ordered by date, then click on order by points, it takes me to page to ordered by points. It should take me to the start.

Udo
Awesome, thank you guys!
jamesgagan
Looks great! One suggestion, maybe have the links open in a new window. I know this annoys some people, but it makes it easier to get back to your site after looking at someone's project. I don't always remember to control click on the links.
andrethegiant
Sweet, bookmarked. Thanks for sharing the services you used too, url2png looks awesome, can't wait to try it out
sebkomianos
Just so you know, I just finished browsing all 82 pages. Thanks guys! :)
jvdmeij
Cool! Would love to see endless scrolling in there though.
adam-_-
I was tickled by the fact it included a link to itself, for endless browsing..

Nice work though!

hacker007
Oh, wow..love the site! I frequently check out "Show HN" posts. I mostly view the feedback that was given. I like that you included a preview and link to the comments section.

EDIT: I tried it out more. It would be nice to have a search option too.

JonLim
Neat! Definitely bookmarked, I love Show HN posts the most!