
Show HN: my weekend project, Quotably - jordanmessina
http://quotab.ly
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patrickambron
Really cool idea (and nice design). I know it was a weekend project so I bet
most of my feedback are things you've already considered, but here it is:

1) It's a little hard to tell the source of the quote from just the thumbnail,
unless you recognize the cover. I think there should be a title above the
quote that includes Book and Author (in addition to the thumbnail of the
cover)

2) It's such a cool concept, but I'd like to be able to browse by books
(business books, psychology books, fiction, literature, best sellers, etc).

3) Make the page more dynamic, so you don't need to refresh the page every
time you call for a new quote. This will make it much nicer/enticiing to
quickly scroll through quotes. The refresh creates a bit of friction

4) Make it easier to tweet/share it out. You have a tweet/pin button in the
corner, but I would integrate it into the quote box. If it's a good quote, I
want to post it to other places

~~~
jordanmessina
Thanks for the great feedback! A couple of the things you suggested were in
the works, however, I set a time limit for how long I would allow myself to
work on this and I simply ran out of time. Next iteration though!

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danso
Nice app and concept...the most-highlighted passages feature of Amazon is
definitely something worth mining.

My first reaction: Is it really necessary to load a 2.33MB background for
this? Even on a fast connection, the background-image-load stuck out like a
sore thumb, clashing with the otherwise smooth operation of the site.

~~~
pirer
Do the 2.33mb background make his concept suffer. Don't think so. Keep that
up, as gp said you've got something there

~~~
danso
Yes, it does make the concept suffer because the concept is the power of the
(crowd-sourced) quote. The slow-loading background is a strong visual
distraction from that, detracting from the vistor's first impression.

(I'd even argue that the background, content-wise, overpowers the quote...and
that's somewhat related to its byte-size)

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alainbryden
This is great. I hope you get some sort of referral payment for linking back
to books for purchase on Amazon. A site like this could inspire a lot of
people to buy a lot of new books.

I recommend allowing users to pick from a set of categories to filter quotes
from genres they want to highlight/ignore. For instance, I would be interested
in seeing highlighted passages from fiction novels without running into a
bunch of self-help or religious passages.

As a further step, this would be a perfect implementation of social media
advertisements. The most popular passages serve as a good advertisement for
books. If you have a little widget that shows a random book and favourited
passage, with the ability to cycle through to others, any website could host
this interactive advertisement and see a portion of revenues from the amazon
kindle purchases.

Keep it up, you're on to something here.

~~~
StavrosK
> I hope you get some sort of referral payment for linking back to books for
> purchase on Amazon. A site like this could inspire a lot of people to buy a
> lot of new books.

It already has one, it seems.

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user24
'"Quotably" shares the most highlighted quotes from the Amazon Kindle'

^ excellent tag line. Explains exactly what I'm looking at. Good job. Nice
idea.

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vrishabh
That's a nice app you have come up with. I like it. Here are some suggestions
to create a better experience:

1\. Use of arrow keys to navigate between the quotes will deliver a much
better experience to the users. 2\. Providing the users with a filter to
browse books by different categories, authors etc. will prove to be a better
discovery platform. 3\. Use AJAX to load the quotes instead of reloading the
page every-time.

~~~
cnanders
Double ditto to all of these points. Also, it might be nice as a feed rather
than one static quote with left/right buttons

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MikeKusold
I really like this site, I could see it becoming a homepage for people. I
would suggest adding button to automatically set it as a homepage for people.
Also, I would like to see the social features become all white for a cleaner
look. I'm not sure if non-tech users will still be able to identify them
though so it would require some A/B testing.

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wheaties
Very nice UI. This one is hilarious:

<http://quotab.ly/792/solitaire-for-kindle-vol-1>

~~~
jordanmessina
:) as you can see, I didn't have time to go through all the quotes I scraped.
We ended up with over 300,000 quotes and chose to use the top 1000 to start.
What I find even funnier is that this was highlighted on the kindle by 980
people!

~~~
coverband
I think you should keep it in, instead of filtering it out. It will make the
site feel more authentic, and the out-of-place quotes can become viral (in the
sense of "no publicity is bad publicity").

I'd also humbly offer two enhancements: 1) Create widgets that other sites can
place on their own web sites, linking back to yours. 2) New daily quotes could
be published via RSS. (For example, I don't see myself visiting the site more
than the initial one, but I can imagine someone putting an RSS feed into his
daily reader to spice it up.)

Good luck.

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hnriot
The app is really cool, there's lots of room for design flair with this.

I was a little disheartened to see so many religious quotes, the same book
(persuit of god) came up three times, and there were others too, I'd say half
of them were religious.

I think the idea is great, but the content would be better if the quotes were
from fiction rather than self-help and faith based books.

~~~
curiousdannii
You feel disheartened that people read and highlight quotes from religious
books? What would you prefer religious people do instead?

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duiker101
looks really nice! I just felt that some minor animation would have given it a
better feeling, for example when I changed quote a fade would have been nice.
I also feel like that a slightly moving background would give an amazing
feeling, the image looks great and I really gives me a sense of moving. I'm
not sure why but this is what I feel.

~~~
jordanmessina
I feel the same way as you! We were in the midst of doing all these things but
decided to hold off to see what others thought of it first. Thanks for the
feedback!

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wldlyinaccurate
I really like the design and the interface, nice work. One thing I found a
little confusing is that if you go "back" and then "forward", the "forward"
action seems to load a random quote instead of returning to the one you were
on.

~~~
jordanmessina
It is confusing. I wasn't sure how to keep the interface as simple as possible
and also include the forward functionality. I'll be putting more thought into
this for the next iteration.

~~~
vividmind
I had a similar weekend project - <http://kidactivityideas.com> \- where I had
a similar issue with "randomness". I decided to save the pseudo-random
generator seed in a cookie and thus keep the sequence for each visitor.

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unclegene
<https://kindle.amazon.com/most_popular> \- simple interface, aggregated view
with different filters.

~~~
jordanmessina
That's our source! This is what I mainly used to find new books. The idea was
to make this beautiful and more fun. We're going to add discovery via genres
soon too, hopefully making it even more useful.

~~~
vividmind
Are you guys using their API or RSS/scraping?

~~~
jordanmessina
Just scraping.

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kmfrk
I've toyed with the idea of a social quote site or some basic paid software to
create pretty quotes, and I love that you've included a Pinterest button. I
think it would work better, if you were able to generate an image that could
be pinned on Pinterest instead, though.

The image doesn't have to be shown; the bookmarklet/share button could
probably detect a `display: hidden` image instead. Although that would add to
the bandwidth footprint.

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rshlo
really cool and nice. I will just add that you can use Amazon Associates to
tag the links to the books and earn a few dollars out of it.

~~~
jordanmessina
We're actually already using amazon associates. We could probably make our
affiliate links bigger though!

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ThomPete
Make it a screensaver and I will download it.

~~~
ftwinnovations
+1

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vandershraaf
I don't always find weekend project to be as fancy but this one is exception.
Good job, I really like its simplicity!

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kafkaesque
Beautiful design.

To my eye (and my personal taste), the book image should be valign=top. With
the longer quotes, the book image at the middle looks strange.

Also, again with the longer quotes, the blue links are difficult to read on
that dark/grassy field background. The grey "from" is basically illegible.

I'm using Chrome 22.0.1229.94 m.

Great work, though!

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adrianwaj
Why not also add a plugin that can collect quotes from web-pages with a right-
click? I think that's what quote.fm and quotevault.org sort of already do. But
you could make a kind of flickr for quotes: quotedesk and have it feed pc
desktops or a toolbar display.

~~~
jordanmessina
Awesome ideas. I like the sound of "flickr for quotes" a lot. Thanks!

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unreal37
I'd like to see a blog post in a month to show how much affiliate revenue
you've made from this.

~~~
mbesto
Definitely interested to read this as well! Funny, this has more of a business
model than say ( _gasp_ ) Instagram.

~~~
ubermensche
Should add Twitter to that too?

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praveenhm
It is a very nice site, clean and elegant. Can you share the technology behind
this?

~~~
jordanmessina
Thanks! It's really just a trivial Django app. The real magic comes from
memcaching everything. It's all on a 2gig rackspace vps.

~~~
kevin_p
To be honest, you don't need any php at all. People upthread already mentioned
using ajax to get the next/previous quotes; why not go a step further and send
it all to the user in a straight js file?

Think about it: you said you scraped the data, so it's not like it's going to
be constantly updated - when it changes, it will all change at once and you
can update the versions of your data files. And there's only a fairly small
amount of data, especially compared to the size of your css and background
images (1000 short quotes with title/author/image/url will be well under
500kB, and the compression ratio will be much better than images).

(hmm, 500kB might actually be too big - perhaps have 10 separate .js files
with 100 quotes each, and download a new block when needed? If you shuffle the
order of the blocks and then within each block, it will appear "random enough"
to users)

So, far less server load, and much faster for the user too. Makes the
forward/back problem someone mentioned much easier to solve too - the browser
can remember everything itself, and you don't need to track anything server-
side.

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charleshaanel
Great attempt. You did what 99% of people don't do - take action.

Having said that, did you begin your project with the end in mind. Who is your
paying customer(target market) and what is your revenue model?

~~~
toxik
It's an ad channel.

~~~
charleshaanel
Yes but we all know the ad revenue model increasingly delivers low average
customer lifetime value. The ad model is the default strategy for people who
latch on to Graham's contention "it's easier to make something popular than to
make money from something popular".

I think it's easier to make money from something popular that fills a massive
maslow-style need. IMHO

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adrianwaj
There was a great quote, I clicked left, and it went to the previous quote,
then right, and it went to a new quote with the one I liked gone.

Maybe a grooveshark or youtube-like playlist would work.

~~~
jordanmessina
Ahhh, sorry! It's not as intuitively as I wish it was. I've been struggling
with how to keep the design simple and still allow the proper back/forward
functionality. I think I know what you're getting at with the
grooveshark/youtube playlist. Do you mean how you see the thumbnails along the
bottom and nothing ever disappears but rather shifts left and right? I'll
definitely look into making it like that if I can.

~~~
adrianwaj
Yeah, and just have a way to make favourites and rank (1/10). You could also
have stackoverflow-like sub comments (that can be hidden.)

Also, is there a way of displaying how many highlights a quote has received,
and from whom/when?

~~~
jordanmessina
I do have the number of highlights. I'll consider showing those in the next
release.

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toxik
Bug report: <http://quotab.ly/924/influencer-the-power-to-change-anything>

The thumbnail is wrong.

~~~
jordanmessina
Thank you! Fixed it :)

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chinmoy
Nicely done. Simple neat idea and the execution is perfect. :)

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pawelwentpawel
Looks great! The background image is really nice too. It would be cool if it
would correlate somehow with the quote that is being presented.

~~~
jordanmessina
Yes! I started to attempt this. I had quite a few background images to use,
but I realized assigning a background to each quote would be too large a task
for this initial release. Hopefully I can add this for the next release.

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agilo
Something similar with an interesting mashing feature:
<http://wisbit.akeelali.com/>

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mcenedella
Fantastic weekend project. @patrickambron 's suggestions are the best because
they're the simplest.

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vividmind
I love simple and elegant apps like this! Kudos and I wish you to keep it
growing! Shared...

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fong1991
Nice job! The site looks so clean and simple. Did you use an API to get
quotes?

~~~
jordanmessina
No API. I just scraped the quotes and metadata.

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face7hill
Very cool. I just bought a book because of this. Nice work!

~~~
jordanmessina
Yes! Mission accomplished. I said when I started if only one person discovers
a new book I'll be happy. Which book if you don't mind me asking?

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ecubed
Absolutely beautiful. Great job

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__dontom__
nice design! i hope the amazon affiliate revenue will pay the .ly domain :P

~~~
jordanmessina
Thanks! That's the only goal I have for it :)

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gruseom
Watch out for the fact that most quote websites consist of bogus quotes.
Wikiquote is good though.

~~~
jordanmessina
These quotes are from users on the Amazon Kindle, all quotes are linked to the
exact book the person was reading.

