

Hacker News for Education - rafaelc
http://news.learnboost.com/

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rafaelc
Just to reiterate: this is our soft launch. All of these comments and
suggestions have been awesome and we're making some design/point fixes.

The official launch is Monday 4/19 and we're getting a few education bloggers
to write about this. Let us know if you have suggestions for any other people
to reach out to so that they can get the scoop on Hacker News for Education.

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rjett
I'm not sure if he does any blogging, but HN user tokenadult jumps into my
mind as the most informed person in this community with regards to the state
of the education world. If I were you, I'd try to reach out to him.

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rafaelc
Reached out to him, he emailed within minutes. Awesome.

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rafaelc
Basically we're trying to recreate Hacker News but for educators. We were
surprised to see there isn't something like this for the #education community,
so with some help from Slinkset we've built this. Hopefully we'll save
teachers a lot of time and help everyone find the best content, just like HN.

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derwiki
I've been pleasantly surprised with the number of education posts on HN. Good
luck, I just sent this to my teacher friends :)

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rafaelc
Cool, thanks for doing that! We're doing the official launch on Monday but
wanted to release it to HN early to get the feedback (see some of the comments
about theme, fonts, etc)

And please feel free to contribute edu links there, awesome.

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gabrielroth
Maybe you're already planning this, but you should consider putting some
explanatory 'what-is-this-site' text somewhere prominent. Much of your
potential audience has never seen HN, Digg, or Reddit.

~~~
rafaelc
Funny how even the most simple things are overlooked. Thanks. We're going to
add some text... let me know what you think in a bit.

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gabrielroth
The first two sentences are fine. I'd rethink the third sentence: _Also, up
voting and commenting is how you can help every reader uncover the best of the
best by pushing those articles to the top of the list._

Problems: (1) Most people have no idea what 'up voting' means. (2) The syntax
is needlessly tangled.

What about: "Vote for the articles you find most useful, and they'll rise to
the top of the list."

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rafaelc
Great point. Making that change now!

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natgordon
Reach out to Kirsten Winkler - <http://www.kirstenwinkler.com/>

She's like the techcrunch of online education (someone else said this once).

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rafaelc
Awesome. I will reach out to Kirsten now... thanks!

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smountcastle
Clicking on the left side of the header (not the Login/Register portion)
doesn't bring me to the homepage. It wasn't immediately clear to me that the
Popular link brings me there. This is important if folks arrive at your site
via a link directly to an item.

I like the styling better than HN -- CSS is always better than nested tables
IMHO.

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rafaelc
Oh yeah, CSS is more fun too :)

Good catch on the header link going back to the homepage. Iterating,
iterating, iterating...

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enterneo
This seems to have been blocked by my workplace firewall, not sure if there is
a catchy term somewhere on the URL. I will wait until evening to check out the
web-app, and maybe come up with some suggestions. Thanks for the initiative!

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glen
Awesome! Great work. I'll read it daily and link to it on our blog! Thank you!

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rafaelc
Fantastic. And make sure you take the time to give yourself some credit and
submit your posts too, so that people discover what you've written...

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postfuturist
OpenID logins would be fantastic.

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rafaelc
Soon... we've got to work on our core product for now

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whatwhatwhat
I don't like that I have to login to do anything

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rafaelc
You don't have to login to gain the primary value, which is finding the best
education content. You can click on the links as they're sorted by the
community.

To join the community, you create a username and a password. That's it. Which
is exactly what you had to do to create your account for Hacker News...

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pibefision
Theme and fonts are not good. This is important.

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rafaelc
Suggestions?

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biggitybones
Playing around in Firebug, I think it's a bit easier on the eyes without the
bold title and the title size a bit smaller. Also, I love the arrow in HN -
very simple and unobtrusive. Yours might be fine with a little bit more margin
to the right.

Perhaps maybe a bit more white space as well. With those adjustments I think
it looks great

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rafaelc
Awesome suggestions. OK we're going to play around with some of this and
tweak... one follow up though: do you think the white space is a suggestion
that "the mainstream" will like or is that more for the HN community coming
over to news.learnboost.com ?

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biggitybones
My personal opinion is that while it may not be something that the
"mainstream" notices, it's a bit more comforting on the eyes and appears less
cluttered.

Keep in mind, it's just one person's opinion, and I work with a guy who's
pretty hardcore about padding and white space so I've grown into his style a
bit ;)

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rafaelc
Made some design changes (upgrades?)

What do you think now?

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samd
How many lines of Lisp did it take?

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rafaelc
hahaha... :)

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kishan7
Interesting thoughts!

