Ask HN: bikechatter.com - review & suggestions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=574256

by davidw • 17 years ago

8 20 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Looking for suggestions for this site I whipped up to play around with twitter some, and to unclog my main twitter page of all the cyclists I was following.

davidw8• 17 years ago

Here's the clickable link:

http://www.bikechatter.com

I'm looking for ideas of fun/cool things to do with it to make it more interesting.

icey• 17 years ago

Erm I'm sorry but... What is it?

Is it just a live search of twitter for some term?

davidw8• 17 years ago

It's a collection of professional bike racers on twitter. I guess most technical people could follow them all, but not everyone wants to do that, and not everyone wants to track down new ones, and not everyone is "technical people" either.

It's definitely not aimed at a general audience - if you don't know who Ivan Basso and Cadel Evans are (on the front page right now), it's not for you. But maybe you have some fun ideas just the same:-)

noodle3• 17 years ago

i'm not sure what more you can do, but a good start would be to clean it up. the layout is broken for me.

ispivey• 17 years ago

The layout is broken for me as well (Safari 4).

kajecounterhack• 17 years ago

meh...yeah it's broken (chrome)

davidw8• 17 years ago

Hearing that really made me lose it. I am so f'ing sick of HTML and CSS not working properly from one browser to the next... and the damn thing is pretty simple, and uses a CSS "framework" (blueprint) to boot. It works fine in FF and Konqueror.

Thanks for letting me know, though:-(

noodle3• 17 years ago

you don't fully use blueprint though, which is whats causing the problem :p

#statusnav's parent is a blueprint block, but its breaking for me in the transition from #statusnav's parent div to the #stati table, which isn't blueprinted.

tdedecko• 17 years ago

Not sure this is the best way to unclog the twitter feed. Something like a group in Tweetdeck would work really well to solve that problem.

Though, maybe you can do some neat things with this idea.

First thing that is apparent to me is that there is too much noise. This needs to be reduced in order for me to read this feed. Maybe an up vote system (HN, reddit, etc) to stress important tweets. You could also stress the important tweets with some other metric (number of replies, number of followers, etc).

Second thing that is apparent is that I don't know who half of these cyclists are. I need to know why I am reading x person's tweets. You could expand the bio pages to include more information on the each cyclist (full name, team, rankings, wikipedia link, etc). Also, I want a list of the cyclists that are being tracked.

davidw8• 17 years ago

Thanks, those are good suggestions.

I don't really care about 'unclogging twitter' - that's for someone else to deal with, I just wanted to provide a nice group of cycling feeds, grouped together.

Voting for interesting messages is a good idea, as is adding some information in order to give some information about riders who are not Lance Armstrong and thus relatively obscure.

nswanberg• 17 years ago

The rider list is the only missing feature that I had expected to find.

Seems that there are two areas to cover: who's on Twitter and what are they saying. As for who, definitely add more information but consider grouping the riders for context (by nationality, team, specialty, recent/upcoming races, etc.). Consider adding a text box to suggest another rider.

And as for what they're saying, a sort of "mute" button would be nice; Burke Swindlehurst is funny but a little too prolific. Perhaps allow the posts to be grouped by rider. That way Dave Z fans won't miss his infrequent posts, such as "Raced through a town called Bonar today..."

domnit• 17 years ago

I wouldn't put all those messages up there with my own copyright notice. Besides that, I only see profile pics next to a few cyclists, so that could use a fix. Seems like this could be useful to someone in that community--maybe try pulling out trends, the way Twitter does across the whole service.

davidw8• 17 years ago

Good point - fixed.

chuchurocka• 17 years ago

good start, not displaying correctly in Safari on XP. I do follow cycling though so I do see some value in the site itself once things get worked out.

mr_justin• 17 years ago

As has already been stated, your layout needs work. Looks like you've got a table (gasp!) that is not clearing the floated status bar content or something.

The layout is extremely simple, I think you are overcomplicating it by using a "blueprint". It's just a bunch of content the flows linearly down the page, no need for floats or anything fancy.

orlick• 17 years ago

OK... As a huge cycling fan I love the idea of this site. I could follow these guys on Twitter but I like the idea of taking a 2 minute break and just skimming this site instead.

Some suggestions:

1 - Spend time on making a more cycling oriented design 2 - Add thumbnails of the cyclists pictures next to their comments and maybe link to a bio page

Ask HN: bikechatter.com - review & suggestions

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