HN Explorer

Show HN: Write the best headline for your content with this simple app

7 points by collypops ↗ HN
This was inspired by Upworthy's advice [0] that for you to discover the best headline for your content, you must force yourself to write 25 of them and the best will jump out at you.

So yeah, you can do this in a text editor, or a spreadsheet, or whatever, but I had a spare evening and I wanted to cut my teeth on Facebook's React JS library. I picked a simple example and set to work. The end result is this little app. I like the idea of distraction-free writing, and a simple list-style app with no visual clutter seemed like a nice environment to write headlines.

I got a jump-start by looking at the React TodoMVC example [1], then creating a simple build process with grunt & browserify (which I've now extracted into a starter project for others to use [2]). I have to say I really like React and a lot of the design decisions it's made, although writing in the pseudo-JS syntax (JSX) took a little getting used to, but was made easier with a code highlighting plugin for Sublime.

Have a play, and let me know what you think!

http://colin-gourlay.com/25headlines/

[0]: http://www.slideshare.net/Upworthy/upworthy-10-ways-to-win-the-internets

[1]: http://todomvc.com/labs/architecture-examples/react/

[2]: https://github.com/colingourlay/grunt-init-browserify-react-stylus

5 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 28.7 ms ] thread
tchadwick
Looks good to me! I went straight to the site without reading your post and was confused about what I was supposed to be doing, but I did come up with some some silly headlines.
collypops
Yeah, it's in early stages, so I've not gone as far as writing hints/instructions into it to set expectations. It's based on the TodoMVC apps, so you can double-click an existing headline to edit it, but I'm still working out how to best enable that functionality on mobile.
justhw
Nice work. I skimmed too quick and thought your app was going to provide me with 25 headlines when I paste a youtube link. Talk about a challenge.

You've got a really neat interface, I like it. I also read on Quora about upworthy's headline generation process, it's fascinating.

collypops
That's definitely something I'm interested in doing.

The way I see it is, you'd provide all the actors (people, places, objects), actions, and it would generate a maybe 4 or 5 to get you started by mixing in different styles of headline, from spoiler-style right through to linkbait. You can then carry on, depending on the style of your website.

There's better people than me out there to attempt that kind of stuff, but I'd enjoy taking a stab at it myself.