Show HN: my weekend project, Quotably

by jordanmessina • 14 years ago

142 75 14 years ago

Really cool idea (and nice design). I know it was a weekend project so I bet most of my feedback are things you've already considered, but here it is:

1) It's a little hard to tell the source of the quote from just the thumbnail, unless you recognize the cover. I think there should be a title above the quote that includes Book and Author (in addition to the thumbnail of the cover)

2) It's such a cool concept, but I'd like to be able to browse by books (business books, psychology books, fiction, literature, best sellers, etc).

3) Make the page more dynamic, so you don't need to refresh the page every time you call for a new quote. This will make it much nicer/enticiing to quickly scroll through quotes. The refresh creates a bit of friction

4) Make it easier to tweet/share it out. You have a tweet/pin button in the corner, but I would integrate it into the quote box. If it's a good quote, I want to post it to other places

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

Thanks for the great feedback! A couple of the things you suggested were in the works, however, I set a time limit for how long I would allow myself to work on this and I simply ran out of time. Next iteration though!

austenallred• 14 years ago

1. There actually is a title and author, it's just in blue below the box and hard to read.

alexsb92• 14 years ago

One other feature I'd like to see is an "Add to Wishlist" button. Writing the book title in a new tab is quite annoying and this would definitely help me save time.

duiker101• 14 years ago

looks really nice! I just felt that some minor animation would have given it a better feeling, for example when I changed quote a fade would have been nice. I also feel like that a slightly moving background would give an amazing feeling, the image looks great and I really gives me a sense of moving. I'm not sure why but this is what I feel.

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

I feel the same way as you! We were in the midst of doing all these things but decided to hold off to see what others thought of it first. Thanks for the feedback!

patrickambron2• 14 years ago

Definitely agree. A few simple changes and you can make it really easy/fun to go through lots and lots of quotes :)

wldlyinaccurate• 14 years ago

I really like the design and the interface, nice work. One thing I found a little confusing is that if you go "back" and then "forward", the "forward" action seems to load a random quote instead of returning to the one you were on.

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

It is confusing. I wasn't sure how to keep the interface as simple as possible and also include the forward functionality. I'll be putting more thought into this for the next iteration.

vividmind3• 14 years ago

I had a similar weekend project - http://kidactivityideas.com - where I had a similar issue with "randomness". I decided to save the pseudo-random generator seed in a cookie and thus keep the sequence for each visitor.

wheaties• 14 years ago

Very nice UI. This one is hilarious:

http://quotab.ly/792/solitaire-for-kindle-vol-1

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

:) as you can see, I didn't have time to go through all the quotes I scraped. We ended up with over 300,000 quotes and chose to use the top 1000 to start. What I find even funnier is that this was highlighted on the kindle by 980 people!

coverband• 14 years ago

I think you should keep it in, instead of filtering it out. It will make the site feel more authentic, and the out-of-place quotes can become viral (in the sense of "no publicity is bad publicity").

I'd also humbly offer two enhancements: 1) Create widgets that other sites can place on their own web sites, linking back to yours. 2) New daily quotes could be published via RSS. (For example, I don't see myself visiting the site more than the initial one, but I can imagine someone putting an RSS feed into his daily reader to spice it up.)

Good luck.

rshlo• 14 years ago

really cool and nice. I will just add that you can use Amazon Associates to tag the links to the books and earn a few dollars out of it.

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

We're actually already using amazon associates. We could probably make our affiliate links bigger though!

chinmoy• 14 years ago

Nicely done. Simple neat idea and the execution is perfect. :)

fong1991• 14 years ago

Nice job! The site looks so clean and simple. Did you use an API to get quotes?

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

No API. I just scraped the quotes and metadata.

danso2• 14 years ago

Nice app and concept...the most-highlighted passages feature of Amazon is definitely something worth mining.

My first reaction: Is it really necessary to load a 2.33MB background for this? Even on a fast connection, the background-image-load stuck out like a sore thumb, clashing with the otherwise smooth operation of the site.

mnicole• 14 years ago

Agreed, the design overwhelmed the quotes.

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

Whoops! I had planned on fixing that before I shared. Thanks for the heads up.

pirer• 14 years ago

Do the 2.33mb background make his concept suffer. Don't think so. Keep that up, as gp said you've got something there

danso2• 14 years ago

Yes, it does make the concept suffer because the concept is the power of the (crowd-sourced) quote. The slow-loading background is a strong visual distraction from that, detracting from the vistor's first impression.

(I'd even argue that the background, content-wise, overpowers the quote...and that's somewhat related to its byte-size)

unclegene• 14 years ago

https://kindle.amazon.com/most_popular - simple interface, aggregated view with different filters.

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

That's our source! This is what I mainly used to find new books. The idea was to make this beautiful and more fun. We're going to add discovery via genres soon too, hopefully making it even more useful.

vividmind3• 14 years ago

Are you guys using their API or RSS/scraping?

unreal37• 14 years ago

I'd like to see a blog post in a month to show how much affiliate revenue you've made from this.

mbesto• 14 years ago

Definitely interested to read this as well! Funny, this has more of a business model than say (gasp) Instagram.

ubermensche• 14 years ago

Should add Twitter to that too?

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

Great idea. My goal was to just have it pay for itself, I'll write a follow up and let you know if it exceeds that.

adrianwaj3• 14 years ago

There was a great quote, I clicked left, and it went to the previous quote, then right, and it went to a new quote with the one I liked gone.

Maybe a grooveshark or youtube-like playlist would work.

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

Ahhh, sorry! It's not as intuitively as I wish it was. I've been struggling with how to keep the design simple and still allow the proper back/forward functionality. I think I know what you're getting at with the grooveshark/youtube playlist. Do you mean how you see the thumbnails along the bottom and nothing ever disappears but rather shifts left and right? I'll definitely look into making it like that if I can.

adrianwaj3• 14 years ago

Yeah, and just have a way to make favourites and rank (1/10). You could also have stackoverflow-like sub comments (that can be hidden.)

Also, is there a way of displaying how many highlights a quote has received, and from whom/when?

alainbryden• 14 years ago

This is great. I hope you get some sort of referral payment for linking back to books for purchase on Amazon. A site like this could inspire a lot of people to buy a lot of new books.

I recommend allowing users to pick from a set of categories to filter quotes from genres they want to highlight/ignore. For instance, I would be interested in seeing highlighted passages from fiction novels without running into a bunch of self-help or religious passages.

As a further step, this would be a perfect implementation of social media advertisements. The most popular passages serve as a good advertisement for books. If you have a little widget that shows a random book and favourited passage, with the ability to cycle through to others, any website could host this interactive advertisement and see a portion of revenues from the amazon kindle purchases.

Keep it up, you're on to something here.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

> I hope you get some sort of referral payment for linking back to books for purchase on Amazon. A site like this could inspire a lot of people to buy a lot of new books.

It already has one, it seems.

MikeKusold• 14 years ago

I really like this site, I could see it becoming a homepage for people. I would suggest adding button to automatically set it as a homepage for people. Also, I would like to see the social features become all white for a cleaner look. I'm not sure if non-tech users will still be able to identify them though so it would require some A/B testing.

vandershraaf• 14 years ago

I don't always find weekend project to be as fancy but this one is exception. Good job, I really like its simplicity!

adrianwaj3• 14 years ago

Why not also add a plugin that can collect quotes from web-pages with a right-click? I think that's what quote.fm and quotevault.org sort of already do. But you could make a kind of flickr for quotes: quotedesk and have it feed pc desktops or a toolbar display.

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

Awesome ideas. I like the sound of "flickr for quotes" a lot. Thanks!

gruseom• 14 years ago

Watch out for the fact that most quote websites consist of bogus quotes. Wikiquote is good though.

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

These quotes are from users on the Amazon Kindle, all quotes are linked to the exact book the person was reading.

vividmind3• 14 years ago

I love simple and elegant apps like this! Kudos and I wish you to keep it growing! Shared...

praveenhm• 14 years ago

It is a very nice site, clean and elegant. Can you share the technology behind this?

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

Thanks! It's really just a trivial Django app. The real magic comes from memcaching everything. It's all on a 2gig rackspace vps.

kevin_p• 14 years ago

To be honest, you don't need any php at all. People upthread already mentioned using ajax to get the next/previous quotes; why not go a step further and send it all to the user in a straight js file?

Think about it: you said you scraped the data, so it's not like it's going to be constantly updated - when it changes, it will all change at once and you can update the versions of your data files. And there's only a fairly small amount of data, especially compared to the size of your css and background images (1000 short quotes with title/author/image/url will be well under 500kB, and the compression ratio will be much better than images).

(hmm, 500kB might actually be too big - perhaps have 10 separate .js files with 100 quotes each, and download a new block when needed? If you shuffle the order of the blocks and then within each block, it will appear "random enough" to users)

So, far less server load, and much faster for the user too. Makes the forward/back problem someone mentioned much easier to solve too - the browser can remember everything itself, and you don't need to track anything server-side.

hnriot• 14 years ago

The app is really cool, there's lots of room for design flair with this.

I was a little disheartened to see so many religious quotes, the same book (persuit of god) came up three times, and there were others too, I'd say half of them were religious.

I think the idea is great, but the content would be better if the quotes were from fiction rather than self-help and faith based books.

tiglionabbit• 14 years ago

Religious quotes are to be expected, since quoting a book is a huge part of Western religion.

There's religious fiction too. Though perhaps a tagging system would help you filter out what you don't want to see.

dinduks• 14 years ago

Same thing here. My first quote was sadly religious as well as many others, among less than ten quotes.

curiousdannii• 14 years ago

You feel disheartened that people read and highlight quotes from religious books? What would you prefer religious people do instead?

user24• 14 years ago

'"Quotably" shares the most highlighted quotes from the Amazon Kindle'

^ excellent tag line. Explains exactly what I'm looking at. Good job. Nice idea.

vrishabh• 14 years ago

That's a nice app you have come up with. I like it. Here are some suggestions to create a better experience:

1. Use of arrow keys to navigate between the quotes will deliver a much better experience to the users. 2. Providing the users with a filter to browse books by different categories, authors etc. will prove to be a better discovery platform. 3. Use AJAX to load the quotes instead of reloading the page every-time.

tonybaroneee• 14 years ago

Ditto to #1 and #3.

cnanders• 14 years ago

Double ditto to all of these points. Also, it might be nice as a feed rather than one static quote with left/right buttons

__dontom__• 14 years ago

nice design! i hope the amazon affiliate revenue will pay the .ly domain :P

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

Thanks! That's the only goal I have for it :)

kmfrk• 14 years ago

I've toyed with the idea of a social quote site or some basic paid software to create pretty quotes, and I love that you've included a Pinterest button. I think it would work better, if you were able to generate an image that could be pinned on Pinterest instead, though.

The image doesn't have to be shown; the bookmarklet/share button could probably detect a `display: hidden` image instead. Although that would add to the bandwidth footprint.

pawelwentpawel• 14 years ago

Looks great! The background image is really nice too. It would be cool if it would correlate somehow with the quote that is being presented.

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

Yes! I started to attempt this. I had quite a few background images to use, but I realized assigning a background to each quote would be too large a task for this initial release. Hopefully I can add this for the next release.

mcenedella• 14 years ago

Fantastic weekend project. @patrickambron 's suggestions are the best because they're the simplest.

ThomPete• 14 years ago

Make it a screensaver and I will download it.

ftwinnovations• 14 years ago

ecubed• 14 years ago

Absolutely beautiful. Great job

kafkaesque• 14 years ago

Beautiful design.

To my eye (and my personal taste), the book image should be valign=top. With the longer quotes, the book image at the middle looks strange.

Also, again with the longer quotes, the blue links are difficult to read on that dark/grassy field background. The grey "from" is basically illegible.

I'm using Chrome 22.0.1229.94 m.

Great work, though!

hackly• 14 years ago

Something similar with an interesting mashing feature: http://wisbit.akeelali.com/

charleshaanel2• 14 years ago

Great attempt. You did what 99% of people don't do - take action.

Having said that, did you begin your project with the end in mind. Who is your paying customer(target market) and what is your revenue model?

toxik2• 14 years ago

It's an ad channel.

charleshaanel2• 14 years ago

Yes but we all know the ad revenue model increasingly delivers low average customer lifetime value. The ad model is the default strategy for people who latch on to Graham's contention "it's easier to make something popular than to make money from something popular".

I think it's easier to make money from something popular that fills a massive maslow-style need. IMHO

jlarocco• 14 years ago

I think the idea is that people look at quotes and then click the associate links to Amazon.

I don't know how the associate program works, but I clicked through to a number of books. It won't make him rich, but it might make him a few dollars a month.

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

No end in mind! Aside from my company, I hadn't launched anything in a while and had the itch. I'm not looking to make a fortune (I'd be fine making $0 to be honest). I wanted a site like this, so I decided to build it when I realized it didn't exist.

toxik2• 14 years ago

Bug report: http://quotab.ly/924/influencer-the-power-to-change-anything

The thumbnail is wrong.

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

Thank you! Fixed it :)

face7hill• 14 years ago

Very cool. I just bought a book because of this. Nice work!

jordanmessina20• 14 years ago

Yes! Mission accomplished. I said when I started if only one person discovers a new book I'll be happy. Which book if you don't mind me asking?

Show HN: my weekend project, Quotably

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