

Show HN: CaptainObvio.us - a place to share ideas - Aaronontheweb
http://captainobvio.us/

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Eliezer
Allow voting. -- Captain Obvious

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Aaronontheweb
That's high on my list of things to add - that, tagging, and email
subscriptions. Love the feedback :D

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jarin
I might be the only person on the planet who still uses it, but RSS would be
awesome!

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Aaronontheweb
On the list - shouldn't be hard to do :D

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Aaronontheweb
I made this in the course of a couple weekends and wanted some feedback on how
I can make it better. I've heard email notifications for comments and easier
social sharing features so far, but I would love to know what else I can do to
make it better.

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elbrodeur
Here are a few simple CSS tweaks that can improve readability. I only spent a
couple of minutes, but I think it helps: <http://pastebin.com/WEKswHND>

EDIT: Here's a screenshot preview: <http://cl.ly/022H381a2N2p1N0h3q0k>

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mryan
Very nice improvements... I hope you are online when I do my own ShowHN ;-)

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elbrodeur
Shoot me an email. I have at least 5 minutes to spare for pretty much anybody.

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mryan
Fantastic, thanks. This is one of the reasons I love HN.

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awfulcoder14
I love this idea. Good implementation too, the only thing i'd change is:

1) Add an overview page with a much bigger list of ideas.

2) Decrease the font size a bit. I could only see two or so ideas at once on
the home page.

3) Perhaps add a voting system of some type?

You also might want to seed it with a bit more content, otherwise you'll have
a hard time breaking out of the chicken and egg problem (that's what ended up
killing me).

EDIT: I'd also add some indication that you aren't going to tweet as me.

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Aaronontheweb
Voting and tagging are on my roadmap. I'm working on seeding it with more
content too (just posted an idea myself!)

As for your comment in the EDIT - does it make you think you're going to end
up tweeting your idea without a chance to opt out? Currently it doesn't tweet
anything out if you comment or submit an idea, so if that's not clear I'd like
to improve it.

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awfulcoder14
Great :)

Nothing about your site indicates you'll spam me, but plenty of sites do. I
am, and i think a lot of people are, reluctant to log in with Twitter without
some reassurance that they and their followers won't be spammed. Just a quick
note can't hurt imo.

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Aaronontheweb
I'm planning on doing that eventually, but it will be opt-in with a big TWEET
THIS checkbox next to the submit button. Do you think that will be clear
enough?

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18pfsmt
Could you get the relevant twitter account, so people could follow it? Looks
abandoned with that last tweet made may '08.

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Aaronontheweb
I created @Obviouscptn last night and am trying to get captainobvious.

I also created an RSS feed <http://captainobvio.us/rss/>

It's foobar in IE at the moment but everywhere else.

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BobKabob
@CaptainObvio.us: There's always room for another great site about ideas, but
check out halfbakery.com. You might get some ideas from their site. It's good,
not great, but has an active user base.

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Aaronontheweb
Is half-bakery meant to be somewhat silly ideas or serious ones?

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joshu
originally it was meant to be silly ones, but the userbase got more serious
over time.

i know the person that built/runs it.

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joshu
I love this.

I had something built that is VERY similar (architecture - blobs of text with
titles, twitter login, comments, voting, tags, flask+mongody) except for
another completely different use: <http://cluedb.com/>

Might be interesting to share code?

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Aaronontheweb
Josh,

Absolutely - I'd love to show you what I'm running under the hood. My email is
aaron AT aaronstannard.com - what's the best way to get in touch?

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Marwy
So you're not going to make the code public?

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Aaronontheweb
Not just yet - I might post it to my Github account
(<https://github.com/aaronontheweb>) once I get a chance to push a few changes
and sanitize my repo so it doesn't contain my debug and production .config
files

Would you be interested in checking out the source too?

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Marwy
Absolutely. Other would be interested too, I think.

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Aaronontheweb
Ok cool - I'll put together a repo with my .config files sanitized out of it
and with a few critical bug fixes in place and drop it on Github. I'll see if
I can get this done this weekend.

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pero
I found scrolling up and down the page to be very laggy--without much
investigation, it appears to be caused by the background image.

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Aaronontheweb
Could you let me know what browser you're using and what your machine specs
are? You're not the first to report the issue, so I'm trying to see where I
should begin testing.

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quickpost
Same problem here. Firefox 3.6ish / Mac

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GVRV
Very nice v0.1

Just thought I'd let you know that if you ever need an official Tee (weekly
best idea?), there's a good one on threadless:
<http://www.threadless.com/product/2537/Captain_Obvious>

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Aaronontheweb
Dude, that's a great idea and hysterical to boot! Thanks!

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doctororange
Great site, but I would lose the Courier. Might just be my preference.

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Spines11
The background image is causing scrolling lag in Chrome. I turned the
background image off and it fixed the problem.

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thecroth
I also love this - funny cause I think that every creative/idea-generating
mind with any regard to the internet has had this idea before, but I'm glad
that someone is finally making it happen.

My guess to your idea's success is that you need to wire in with the right
people and it'll explode.

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Aaronontheweb
Guys, thanks for all of your feedback! Lots of great ideas and suggestions,
and you helped me find two really nasty bugs that I didn't catch earlier.

I'm going to start hacking away on this the instant I get off of work on
Friday - I can't wait to get started. Thanks, Hacker News!

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mtran
This is really a lot of fun, and could even be a great tool for teams that are
brainstorming ideas. I also love all of the feedback you are getting here and
your receptiveness to it. I look forward to seeing how it grows. Nice work!

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michaelcgorman
Just a tiny, trivial, aesthetic/grammar change: on
<http://captainobvio.us/auth/login> you say "Login to Captain Obvious". I'd
change that to "Log in …".

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tophat02
I had this, err, idea! Congrats for doing what I wouldn't do and implementing
it. Perhaps I should have just put the idea on CaptainObvio.us and let someone
else implement it ;-)

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toufique
Love it! Not sure if I'd remember to come to the site everyday, but I'd
definitely follow a CaptainObvious twitter account if it tweeted newly
submitted ideas.

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sarp
I caused/discovered a bug :) <http://captainobvio.us/details/buy-twitter-
handles>

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Aaronontheweb
YOU KILLED IT!!!!

:P

Probably an error with my controller that does writes to MongoDB - I'll check
it out.

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sarp
After OAuth, it couldn't retrieve my twitter username/picture, displayed them
as null.

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Aaronontheweb
Try logging out and logging back in

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lurchpop
it working for me.

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karterk
Well executed. I would love an RSS feed to subscribe to.

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p0ppe
The link to the comments for ideas with one comment is currently displayed as
"1 Comments". You might want to change that to "1 Comment".

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hucker
Is it mainly meant as a way of getting feedback on ideas, or throwing ideas
out there for others to implement/use?

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swlkr
this is a great idea about... ideas

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madhkrish
I think www.iinspireus.com does a much better job at soliciting feedback for
your ideas!

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bdr
I'd like to submit anonymously

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johns
While I see why people would do this, I think it would ruin the site. When
people are forced to use their real identity I've found the quality is always
much higher.

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huuleon
Something went wrong when i login with my twitter account.

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k00k
Feature request: Automatic URL linking/detection

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drewbaumann
I voted you up sir

