

Ask HN: Review my site (http://www.udoa.com) - freddy

The site called UDOA: Universal Debate and Opinion Aggregation is meant to aggregate news and bills and allow people to voice their opinion on what si going on around them.  The idea being these opinions are not lost and are rolled up into topics and issues and can be extracted to understand trends.<p>It also offers a mashup between the news and bills in Congress so while reading an article you can read the bill it is referring to. (this is still in progress).<p>The site is a work in progress with some broken links and some placeholder text, but I would love feedback on the concept and if people would find if useful.  Trying to take advantage of Gov 2.0.<p>http://www.udoa.com
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rwolf
Some functions of your site appear to be explicitly manual ("bubbling" polls
into more general categories, linking congressional bills to news stories),
but I was unable to find a clear breakdown of what is automatic and what
require human intervention. That information is probably not important to end
users, but as a techie I'd love to hear how it works. Would you mind providing
a breakdown for the HN kids?

edit: you might also want to play with mod_rewrite;
[http://roger.dnsdojo.net/dev/udoa/index.php?module=home&...](http://roger.dnsdojo.net/dev/udoa/index.php?module=home&action=about)
could be expressed as .../home/about or something else a little more human-
friendly

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MicahWedemeyer
Random thoughts:

\- Make the legislative aspect more prominent. It's not clear that
congressional bills are intended to be a big part (right?). It looks like a
standard news aggregator, but I do believe that you're on the right track with
the legislative component.

\- As much as I hate Facebook Connect, you're definitely right to go with it
for login. I'd also consider Twitter, OpenID, or Clickpass.

\- Looks like it's running on a dyndns box, right? Might be time to get real
hosting. Once you start passing the link around it's probably a good idea to
have it on something more reliable than the box under your desk.

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DTrejo
<http://www.udoa.com>

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jacktasia
I found a rather giant security issue...that if a mean person found you would
lose all of your data. I can't find a way to contact you through the site
though.

~~~
jacktasia
I think I found your email address and emailed you.

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teej
It's down for me.

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freddy
Sorr yeah fixing that now.

~~~
freddy
back up now.

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jack7890
Great domain name. You been hanging on to that one for a while?

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tdoggette
I don't particularly like the design: The text is small, and it's not very
distinctive. It could also do with a line of "UDOA is a blah blah blah where
you blah" copy.

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whughes
It's also strongly reminiscent of cnn.com for me. A design which focuses more
on the site's unique features would be nice.

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marcusestes
Put a single "Recent Challenge" above the fold, along with a 1 sentence
explanation of why the user should participate. And test the hell out of user
response to optimize the ones most inviting of action.

Upon first arrival it's much too difficult to understand what the site _does_.

I'm not crazy about the name, either. But it's an interesting idea.

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sigh400
It's pure white for me. I thought it was NoScript but it appears to not be?

