

Ask HN: Review my weekend project - HackerBlogs - Kilimanjaro

A fellow HNer asked days ago about a place for hackers to share their blogs and I dedicated the last week to work on that project, it has been an interesting experience and I wanted to show you all the result. HackerBlogs is an aggregator specifically taylored for developers and entrepreneurs. Please take a look and let me know what you think.
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Kilimanjaro
Link: <http://www.hackerblogs.com>

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Kilimanjaro
I hope you all help me grow the site by just registering your blogs, no need
to create accounts or anything annoying, just enter your blog address and I'll
fetch your feeds everyday for new content. Only personal blogs, no meta-
aggregators or commercial blogs will be allowed, so no techcrunch, digg,
reddit, et al. That will help reduce the marketing noise, fud and payperpost
we get all the time inundating our beloved news sites.

HackerBlogs: for hackers, by hackers.

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mdg
What is the stack? Just curious.

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Kilimanjaro
Python on AppEngine. Zero headaches.

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JoelMcCracken
I would actually enjoy a blogging platform that is designed for hackers. Such
a platform would need syntax highlighting, latex, etc.

There is nothing like this among free blogs. The closest thing is github's
jekyll, which does not actually have latex support on the server.

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raffi
WordPress.com does latex and syntax highlighting.

<http://en.support.wordpress.com/latex/>
<http://en.support.wordpress.com/code/posting-source-code/>

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JoelMcCracken
Is it free to use? e.g. can you use it on the free blogs provided by
wordpress?

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raffi
yes

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adelevie
Great idea. I suggest you also give petercooper's coder.io a look. It's
amazing for Ruby/Rails news, but I'm sure it's great for other topics.

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Kilimanjaro
I saw coder.io on HackerMonthly as I was working on HB, great source of
inspiration.

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adrianwaj
Happy to provide ~120 feed URLS from <http://roomcu.slinkset.com>. Drop me an
email.

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tansey
Probably would be better to show the category tags beside/below the
author/comments subtitle.

I like it though. Rather than inclusive filtering like you have on the right
hand side, is there any way to filter out the categories I don't care about?
Maybe I want all of the blogs except Haskell and C#, for instance.

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Kilimanjaro
That's in the todo list, I'll implement tags next to the title, easier to know
what the article is about.

I'll think about remembering your settings, since I really don't want to
create accounts and stuff. Not easy to implement without accounts tho.

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jgrahamc
I like this idea a lot. I've registered my blog and will be checking it out.
Good luck!

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someone_here
Awesome. The colour scheme seems very familiar.

What do the numbers mean?

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Kilimanjaro
I used the same color palette from HackerNews and HackerMonthly, trying to
make HackerBlogs part of the family.

I hope I don't get sued.

Numbers to the left are just clicks, like showing how many times people has
clicked on such article. Maybe I'll show a top ten of the day or something.

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mullr
An RSS feed would be very useful.

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singer
Great idea. However, the site does not render properly in IE8.

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Kilimanjaro
I know, sorry about that, IE doesn't support custom tags and HackerBlogs use
them everywhere.

It is just a personal attempt at my own version of HTML6. Take a look at the
source code.

In the future I'll change all custom tags to ugly divs again.

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gcampbell
I believe you can work around this in IE by using document.createElement() in
the head for any custom tag you want to use - see [http://html5doctor.com/how-
to-get-html5-working-in-ie-and-fi...](http://html5doctor.com/how-to-get-
html5-working-in-ie-and-firefox-2/).

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Kilimanjaro
Thanks for the pointer, I'll try to fix it and see how it works.

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kno
There’s a very good book by Steve Krug about usability: "Don’t make me think".

I have a strong feeling that you haven’t read that book, because your make me
think so much that I will suggest you work on presentation and colors.

Edit: I figure it could be an IE thing --

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sdevlin
This comment would be more helpful if you gave him some specific criticisms.
What did you have to think about? How could he fix it?

Kilimanjaro, it seemed pretty straightforward to me.

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mdg
happy 1 year

