

I got tired of reading about building websites. So, I built this. attempts+=1 - jastr
http://www.crowdhatting.com

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pluies_public
Really cool concept, huge kudos for going through and actually making it :)

That said, there's a big, big blunder on the UX side: there is absolutely no
feedback. The cursor _has to_ change when you hover the clickable elements,
it's the expected behaviour of every website out there and is really
disturbing that it doesn't.

Implementing some sort of feedback after clicking a link (spinner would be
cool, greyed-out background maybe) is also necessary. Right now, the user has
no idea what's happening (has my click being taken into account? What's
happening? Who knows?) - say right there, I'm on Willy Wonka, clicked
Ravenclaw, and nothing happens at all. So I reclick. Nothing happens. Might be
the server working in the background, might be a bug - oh, there, it just
loaded, and also voted Ravenclaw for Van Gogh because I clicked twice on
Ravenclaw.

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jastr
thanks for the feedback and ideas. in testing, after clicking on a house, a
new celebrity would appear instantly, so there was no reason to show a waiting
bar. now we can't handle the load!!! lesson learned. thanks! switching to a
new box soon..

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swang
Your site is kinda slow at the moment so I'll just mention a few things.

Changing the house logos to text after a 1-2 second delay is annoying. Either
it should change when you hover over it or better yet create a div that hovers
over the mouse with the description instead. Having the logo change to text
and then clicking that as a confirmation is weird and probably not very
intuitive.

There's no way to tell whether my vote was submitted or not.

You're using Wikipedia to load the images instead of loading it on your own
server. Not sure if it violates whatever Wikipedia image policies but you
shouldn't be leeching images off other people's servers. That's bad form and
makes your site feel slow.

Voting shouldn't be allowed until the image actually loads (again because of
above, it takes forever to load). I clicked on one of the house logos and
because there wasn't anything to indicate that my vote was sent I clicked it
again. The application then quickly loaded the next celebrity and then skipped
right to the next one because it assumed that my double click meant I was
voting the same house for 2 consecutive celebrities.

Besides some interface issues. Good concept.

~~~
jastr
thanks.

changing the logo - changing to text on hover, i thought was really annoying
when moving the mouse around. good idea with the div, will try that.

submitted votes - will brainstorm ideas to show you've voted

vote on image load - do you know a good way to check if the image has loaded?

thanks for the feedback

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jwdunne
In regards to checking if an image has loaded, there is an an onload event in
JS which, as the name implies, triggers upon the image loading.

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ender7
Needs an "I don't know who that is" button.

Really fun though!

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IanDrake
It didn't really work for me, but I think the concept is funny.

Sadly, I see a C&D in your future...or if SOPA is passed some jail time.

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ghc
Now it's time to read about scaling websites ;)

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jastr
any suggested reading!? akamai isn't within my budget at the moment...

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ghc
That's actually a tough one! There are a lot of books about scalability (such
as the O'Reilly ones, which I've read), but they don't really tell you what
you probably need to know right now.

Mostly it's technology dependent...read up on caching, if you haven't already.
Memcached or Redis can make a huge difference in performance.

If you let us know your software stack I'm sure there will be an expert to
chime in and let you know the simplest hack to get things responding faster
right now.

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j_camarena
I did the same here. I learned HTML/CSS from zero (im a mechanichal engineer).

My last page using Joomla two years later: <http://guali.com.mx>

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glimcat
Congratulations, you have just reduced the distance to becoming good at this
by an order of magnitude.

attempts += 1 while 1

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jastr
the site is practically at a standstill now! thanks for using it.

I'll be moving it to a better machine tomorrow. Should I leave it up in the
meantime (even though super slow) or put up a splash page eg. "come back
soon"?

anyone have any ideas/preferences?

~~~
rprime
Better something than nothing.

 _Cache all the things!_

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cantbecool
What technologies did you use to make it?

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jaequery
mugatu, enough said. i give it a thumbs up.

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jastr
after 3 hours, i'm on a new server!

