

Ask HN: bikechatter.com - review & suggestions - davidw

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.
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tdedecko
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.

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davidw
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.

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nswanberg
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..."

~~~
davidw
Ok, I added the complete list. I think working on some categorization/user
ratings sounds good too. Thanks!

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davidw
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.

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

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

~~~
davidw
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:-)

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orlick
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

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domnit
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.

~~~
davidw
Good point - fixed.

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noodle
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.

~~~
davidw
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:-(

~~~
noodle
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.

~~~
davidw
The table should just be contained, though, right? I guess not. That seems to
fix it. Don't understand why it's completely broken in one place and works
fine in another, and of course it's frustrating to not even be able to test
these things easily across different systems. Thanks again for the tip.

~~~
noodle
if you're going to use blueprint or any css framework, you need to use it
100%. or as much of 100% as you can. otherwise, it won't be able to do its own
job.

and, yeah, such is the life of the web developer/designer. i have 12 browsers
installed on my windows box.

~~~
davidw
> such is the life of the web developer/designer

The thing that drives me nuts is that it has been the life of the web
developer since I started doing this in 1997. I'm sick of things working in
one place and not in another.

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mr_justin
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.

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chuchurocka
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.

