HN Explorer

Ask HN: Review my site (http://www.udoa.com)

14 points by freddy ↗ HN
The site called UDOA: Universal Debate and Opinion Aggregation is meant to aggregate news and bills and allow people to voice their opinion on what si going on around them. The idea being these opinions are not lost and are rolled up into topics and issues and can be extracted to understand trends.

It also offers a mashup between the news and bills in Congress so while reading an article you can read the bill it is referring to. (this is still in progress).

The site is a work in progress with some broken links and some placeholder text, but I would love feedback on the concept and if people would find if useful. Trying to take advantage of Gov 2.0.

http://www.udoa.com

13 comments

[ 34.2 ms ] story [ 880 ms ] thread
rwolf
Some functions of your site appear to be explicitly manual ("bubbling" polls into more general categories, linking congressional bills to news stories), but I was unable to find a clear breakdown of what is automatic and what require human intervention. That information is probably not important to end users, but as a techie I'd love to hear how it works. Would you mind providing a breakdown for the HN kids?

edit: you might also want to play with mod_rewrite; http://roger.dnsdojo.net/dev/udoa/index.php?module=home&... could be expressed as .../home/about or something else a little more human-friendly

tdoggette
I don't particularly like the design: The text is small, and it's not very distinctive. It could also do with a line of "UDOA is a blah blah blah where you blah" copy.
whughes
It's also strongly reminiscent of cnn.com for me. A design which focuses more on the site's unique features would be nice.
MicahWedemeyer
Random thoughts:

- Make the legislative aspect more prominent. It's not clear that congressional bills are intended to be a big part (right?). It looks like a standard news aggregator, but I do believe that you're on the right track with the legislative component.

- As much as I hate Facebook Connect, you're definitely right to go with it for login. I'd also consider Twitter, OpenID, or Clickpass.

- Looks like it's running on a dyndns box, right? Might be time to get real hosting. Once you start passing the link around it's probably a good idea to have it on something more reliable than the box under your desk.

marcusestes
Put a single "Recent Challenge" above the fold, along with a 1 sentence explanation of why the user should participate. And test the hell out of user response to optimize the ones most inviting of action.

Upon first arrival it's much too difficult to understand what the site does.

I'm not crazy about the name, either. But it's an interesting idea.

teej
It's down for me.
freddy
Sorr yeah fixing that now.
jack7890
Great domain name. You been hanging on to that one for a while?
jacktasia
I found a rather giant security issue...that if a mean person found you would lose all of your data. I can't find a way to contact you through the site though.
jacktasia
I think I found your email address and emailed you.
sigh400
It's pure white for me. I thought it was NoScript but it appears to not be?