
Today I launched my solo project, Listry. Feedback/suggestions appreciated - Spines11
http://www.listry.com/
======
losvedir
Very nice. At first, I didn't really see the point of it - another voting/wiki
type thing, sigh - but the interface is so _fast_ and compelling that it just
drew me in.

I registered so I could vote on something, decided to see what creating an
article was like, and it was so smooth it made me want to start more, and then
eventually realize I have been looking for something like this.

I started a list of "Coffee shops in Cambridge, MA" because I remembered that
I had been looking for just such a list the other day. I figured it's mostly
HN users on there now, probably, and a fair amount of us are from here. I'm
not positive what types of lists you're wanting, though, so I won't be hurt if
you delete it!

Feature request: I would love to add some simple custom attribute to each
list. For instance, with the coffee shops, it'd be nice if I could define an
attribute for that list of "Free wifi?" and then each item could select either
yes/no as it's created. An article on vim color themes could define an
attribute of "Background?" with options "light, dark, both".

At some point in the future, then, you could filter and look at just the items
in the list that match an attribute. E.g., I can look at the coffee shops and
filter to look at only the ones that give free wifi.

Great work!

~~~
mbyrne
side note: losvedir, if you actually are interested in Cambridge Coffee Shops
for startups, check out <http://hcombine.com/22/hcombine-start-up-coffee-
shops/>

~~~
losvedir
Hey, that looks great. Thanks!

------
arturadib
Are votes really a 1-5 rating? I thought it was bit counterintuitive (I guess
in my experience "votes" are typically binary). How about allowing just thumbs
up/down?

~~~
Spines11
From this being the top comment, it seems everyone agrees. I'll add it to my
to-do list :)

~~~
Spines11
Should I keep the 5 star rating control for rating articles, and change the
voting on items to thumbs up/down? Or should I change both the voting on items
and voting on articles to thumbs up/down?

~~~
fuzzythinker
I don't see why they should be different. Consistency conveys simplicity.

------
Spines11
This is the project I've been working on for the past 6 months. It combines
the features of wikis with a voting system that determines the best parts of
an article. There's still a lot of improvements I need to make, but I wanted
to launch early and get feedback.

~~~
ayanb
Awesome work really, like the concept and totally love the speed of the site.
Are you working on this full time?

~~~
Spines11
Thanks! I'm glad people are noticing the speed, I spent a ton of time on that
:). Yep, working on it full-time.

------
stingraycharles
Congratulations with your launch! It looks like you've got a nice hybrid
between HN/Reddit-style voting and Stackoverflow-topics, - personally haven't
seen such a site before. It'll be interesting to see whether you'll succeed
building a community around it. Any plan-of-attacks on gaining traction?

~~~
Spines11
Thanks! Yea, building the community will be the tough part. I was planning on
writing high quality articles on Listry and then hopefully some of the people
that read the article would want to add their own input to the article and
that's how they would get started contributing.

Any suggestions?

~~~
stingraycharles
I'm not sure, - that could be a way, but only if you actually enjoy writing
those articles.

Just thinking out loud, your time could also be spend editorially adding more
and more subjects and quality lists. The whole problem with such a site is
that you need to maintain some level of quality, which is best maintained by
attracting people that care about that quality. If you have a lot of quality
lists with quality subjects, the next thing you need to ensure is that Google
(and other search engines) pick up on that.

If I search for "emacs color themes", for example, you want listry to be the
#1 match in Google with a list of links to color themes.

That, and just balls: try to get some popular bloggers to cover your site. If
they like the concept, they won't mind vouching for you.

------
barmstrong
Site looks great. This is pretty similar to an idea i had a few years back:
<http://buyersvote.com/categories>

It has languished since and never took off, but the pieces were all there:
user generated listed, votes, wiki style edits, comments etc.

I've had some time to think on why mine never took off and wanted to share a
few ideas in case it helps.

\- critical mass is hard, StackOverflow (my inspiration for it) was able to
launch with two massive blog posts from influencers

\- how to counteract this? either empower your users to create their own "sub-
listries" and try to attract influencers

\- or do the bowling pin strategy <http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-
pin-strategy/>

\- or do the tripadvisor approach (read Founders At Work for this story) and
spend massively to seed content for several years to reach critical mass on
your own

Few other thoughts:

\- I think your design is better

\- Is "Articles" the right word here? Esp given your domain would "lists" work
better?

Hope it helps!

~~~
Spines11
Thanks for your advice and compliments :)

I was debating between calling them "lists" or "articles", and decided on
"articles" because my hope is that over time they will become full-fledged
articles (true that my domain name makes that a bit confusing). Paul Graham's
article on "the 18 mistakes that kill startups"
(<http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html>) is the type of article I am
shooting for with Listry. Where each item of the article has 1 or more in-
depth paragraphs of explanation or details.

------
plq
congrats on launching! why not eat your own dog food and start a [sticky] list
for feature requests? i think it'd be a nice way to get early adopters get
hooked up.

------
davidcollantes
Looks quite nice. Please implement OpenID, or similar. I do not want yet
another account. Cheers!

~~~
Spines11
Haha, okay. That'll be next on my TODO list :)

------
SudarshanP
I tried starting a list of "shops in india that would be of interest to
Hackers and Makers": [http://www.listry.com/list/83050/list-of-shops-in-india-
that...](http://www.listry.com/list/83050/list-of-shops-in-india-that-are-
interesting-to-hackers-makers) on the lines of "Coffee shops in Cambridge,
MA"... And I added two shops that I had painstaking discovered a few months
ago for buying a few things I needed.

I was a bit annoyed that getting things you want from your own
country(minimizes shipping and taxes) is still so hard in the era of google.
So I wanted to share it with the world hoping that others would populate the
list further and I could benefit from this. But it was voted -2. Now I have no
complaints against that... Maybe such a list is unsuitable for this type of
site. But I think it may be a smarter idea for you to make it more obvious as
to what constitutes a bad list. Why "Coffee shops in Campridge" is kosher and
why "Shops interesting for hackers in India" is not.

~~~
Spines11
Hi SudarshanP,

I voted you down because I thought it was spam, sorry. I've undone my vote now
so you are back to 0. When I voted there was just one item with a link, and it
looked like someone just wanted to advertise their online store.

Your article seems fine for the site. An optimum article would be more than
just a list of links though.

Ideally, I want articles to become full-fledged, comprehensive articles. Like
the article for "Reasons to Quit Smoking". In time, I hope that article can
become a comprehensive resource of all the best reasons to quit smoking. Then
someone who is trying to quit smoking can use that article as motivation to
quit.

I'll be working on a commenting system so that in the future it'll be easier
to discuss this type of thing on the actual article page.

Thanks for trying out the site and providing feedback! And sorry again for
thinking it was spam.

------
rshm
Prepare some seed content yourself. Just "listphrase" existing similar sites.
It will give a bit of realness to new visitor.

Cheers and best of luck.

------
ChrisNorstrom
1 little thing -> Your "Browse Popular Articles" and "Contribute to New
Articles" buttons are not vertically centered. The white space above them is
6px less than the white space below. It looks like you wanted them to be the
same in your css but the #mainbuttons is 65px in height and the buttons are
59px in height.

If you change #mainbuttons height to 59px and bump the margins a little bit
more to 29 or 30px you get a nicer look I personally think. A little bit more
white space separates the buttons from the top header and to me is easier on
the eyes.

I really like the site thought. There's lots of these but yours is different,
the content stands out more than the site, and to me that's what matters.

------
fuzzythinker
I like its smoothness and workflow, like others have point out. Enjoy starting
w/o forcing account creation as well.

After entering my abridged version of stackexchange's public web site
checklist (<http://www.listry.com/list/96005/live-app-checklist>), I can see 2
features that I like to see:

\- Allow entering just the "details" part of an article Item. Current workflow
restricts articles to be more of a sub-level categorization. For simple lists
that the article title already describes the article, there's no reason to
require an item title.

\- Allow option to auto insert list bullets/numbers into text that separated
by empty lines.

------
SudarshanP
Nice Site.

Feature request: For each list allow users to link to lists in the wild. For
Eg there could be a 10 reasons to quit smoking on some magazine. The user may
not want to recreate the list, but just provide a bookmark. You could even
provide a "listify" bookmarklet. For Eg Paul Graham's list of reasons why
startups fail and a lot of startup failure story post mortems could be
Supplimentary materials for a list of the same name.

The list which begins life as a list of useful bookmarks to external lists
about the same topic could over time be deduplicated by the community to
create a Master list that would be much more useful than the external lists
themselves.

------
Simucal
Congrats on the launch. I'm curious how your "popular" tab works.

If it is simply sorted by votes with no time-component then your going to have
the same "self-fulfilling prophecy" problem that Stack Overflow had when they
first launched.

~~~
Spines11
Thanks!

Right now the popular tab sorts things based on the votes for the article, and
also the votes for the items within the article. So an article with good items
can rank higher than an article with more votes, but no items.

Right now there isn't any time-component to the popular articles. I was
thinking of having sub-tabs for "popular this week", "popular this month", and
"popular all time", and then having the default be "popular this month".

------
ldh
At least at this early stage with little content, the site seems very snappy.
Looking at the blog, I'm assuming you're running on Google AppEngine? Can you
give us an overview of how the site is implemented?

~~~
Spines11
Thanks for noticing the speed :) I spent a lot of effort on that.

I built my own mini-framework for Google App Engine with a focus on speed. The
main thing that makes it fast is that it utilizes public edge caching for most
content, and the parts of the content that change from user to user are
updated with javascript.

So with the home page, App Engine just serves a static page from it's edge
cache, which is updated every 30 seconds, and the top bar of the site which is
different if you are logged in is updated with javascript to show you
different links if you are logged in.

~~~
bdesimone
God damn. The site really is fast. Well done.

------
StylusEater
Congratulations on launching a Beta! The site is visually pleasing and the
layout works.

I noticed one small detail that is jarring and it should be a simple style
fix. The location of content contained in a div or span shifts when you change
categories on the "New Articles" tab. You should be able to see what I mean by
selecting "New Articles" then watching the Listry icon in the upper left move
to the right (or left) after selecting another category from the list.

~~~
Spines11
Thanks :). I see what you are talking about, it's because the main page is
long enough to have a scrollbar, and then when you choose a category, there
isn't enough content to need to show a scrollbar, right?

------
asadjb
Congrats on launching. From what I've seen in my brief tour of the site, it's
a unique idea.

I agree with stingraycharles that it's a nice and unique hybrid b/w Reddit and
StackOverflow.

Best of luck!

------
avgarrison
For some reason the proxy server at my work is blocking your website with the
message "Virus detected and blocked" and McAfee reports it as having Medium
risk: [http://www.mcafee.com/threat-
intelligence/domain/default.asp...](http://www.mcafee.com/threat-
intelligence/domain/default.aspx?domain=www.listry.com)

~~~
Spines11
Hmm, thanks for the heads up, I'll have to look into that. I don't know what
would be causing that.

~~~
avgarrison
Ya, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, I know this is the last thing you want
to hear on launch day!

------
ch0wn
Very interesting and - as far as I'm concerned - unique concept, clean design.
I really like it so far. Best of luck!

------
JonLim
Great so far! Very minimalistic and easy to navigate.

Notice that you're using Google App Engine to send your welcome emails, and
I'd love to offer you PostageApp (<http://postageapp.com>) while you're in
beta. We'd be happy to help you out with that. :)

Let me know, cheers!

------
jorde
Nice app and congrats for the launch! I'm into list based services but there
aren't too many around. One really similar that I came across about an year
ago was <http://listiki.com/> I really like their wiki/fork-style approach.

~~~
Spines11
Thanks :)

I've seen that site before. Mine's more about creating comprehensive articles
rather than just a list. Something where each item of the article has
paragraph(s) of detail.

Something like Paul Graham's article, "18 Mistakes that Kill Startups"
(<http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html>) would be an ideal Listry
article.

------
zmt
Nice and very fast. Could you give us more info on what stack did you use to
develop/deploy this?

~~~
Spines11
Thanks :)

It's developed with the dynamic language Groovy, on Google App Engine. Here's
a comment with some more details:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803>

------
jackreichert
Congratts! Great idea and implementation! Clean, quick, nice!

One design tweak I would do... Have the descriptions of the lists collapsable
so the reader can skim the list and only get the full scroll effect if they
need.

------
moe
Small tip: shrink the registration-barrier.

1\. Add those social login buttons (facebook, twitter)

2\. Make "e-mail address" the only input field, then mail me a password.

3\. Delay asking me for a display-name until I try an operation that needs it.

------
rbreve
Cool, I had a similar idea a while back, <http://lightsalad.com> it never took
off, and I abandoned the project. Good luck

------
jeff_5nines
This is a really cool application. How do you intend on keeping out crap
article and malicious updates?

Either way, this is a nicely designed interface and great idea.

~~~
Spines11
Thanks :)

For crap articles, people can vote them down, which will move them lower on
the new articles tab and popular articles tab if they are voted low enough.
Also, I can manually delete obviously crap articles, or close articles that
don't fit the format.

For crap edits, they can be undone in the history tab of each article. I need
to do a little work in making rollbacks easier though.

If I get a lot of traffic, I'll have to write some software to help identify
malicious edits.

~~~
darwindeeds
Oh man. You are going to get a lot of traffic. Please do something to block a
spammer's ip. Have a flag button and do a soft delete it after a certain
number of flags. Soft delete because you can review to make sure its actually
crap and not the top item in your page :) Good luck

~~~
Spines11
I just felt the need for that a few minutes ago, a troll overwrote all of the
articles with junk text, and I had no way to easily block his IP. I'll be
working on that ASAP.

------
darwindeeds
Great idea Kyle. How are you going to clean up spams? I like that its open but
if one person decides to spam you will have lot of clean ups to do.

~~~
Spines11
Thanks! Spam edits can be reverted in the history tab, there's still more work
I need to do to make that easier though. Spam articles can be voted down, and
that will take them off the front pages, and I can manually delete them. I'll
probably need to have a "flag article" link down the road though.

------
btw0
Nice idea and good implementation! The home page could look cleaner if you use
less bold font-style and a smaller number of different font-sizes.

------
yesimahuman
I think you can get rid of the password confirm on the popup (you have their
email after all for resets). Could make voting a bit more fluid.

------
cadr
One thing I noticed was that under the 'best text editors' list, Vim shows up
multiple times. Would be nice for it to know to combine or something.

Pretty!

~~~
Spines11
Thanks, that happened because a troll overwrote the entry for Vim with junk
text, and then the people added vim because they didn't see it.

I've manually merged their entries with the main vim entry.

------
cturner
I'm using firefox. For some reason when I'm on the text editor page, text
navigation like space, pageup, pagedown and end don't work.

------
viandante
Only problem I see is incentive to write on your website. People write on SOF
or HN for reputation, why should they write on listry?

~~~
Spines11
One reason could be if you wished there was good resource on a topic.

For example, if you wanted to convince someone that they should develop for
iOS instead of android, you could start an article on Listry titled "Reasons
to develop for iOS". Then add a few reasons of your own to the article, and
then other Listry users could add their reasons, everyone would vote on the
best reasons, and then in the end you would have a good resource of all the
best reasons to develop for iOS.

A reputation system would definitely be a good thing to have too. I was
thinking about creating one, but decided to launch early, and then improve the
site over time.

------
sgerrand
Kudos on a well implemented use of AppEngine - It's really zippy.

Do you have any plans to write a technical overview of your implementation?

~~~
Spines11
Thanks. I'll probably write about the implementation once I get some spare
time. I got a lot of great feedback today that I'll be busy implementing for a
while :)

------
techjohn
Looks like you are using Google custom search. Can you please provide your
perspective on the service.

~~~
Spines11
It's very easy to set up, and it works alright. There is a delay for things to
show up in the search results though. I think once app engine (which is what
Listry runs on) implements full text search, I'll probably make my own
solution using that.

------
bnegreve
Do you have any plan to deal with non disjoint items... that would be an
interesting problem to solve. eg, you have the following :

emacs 30

vim 20

vi 15

------
capdiz
Very good idea. At least each edit made to a story will have to be voted upon.

------
wiradikusuma
hey man this is slick, congrats! btw just curiuos, what's your underlying tech
stack, your website is lightning fast! (given the fact i live in SE asia where
internet quality is crappy)

~~~
Spines11
Thanks :)

It uses my own mini-framework for Google App Engine. This comment has more
details: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803>

------
pacifika
I'm trying to subscribe to your blog but I cannot find a feed?

~~~
Spines11
Ah, didn't implement that yet. I'll get to work on that :)

------
ctdonath
Blocked as "spam/suspicious".

------
eyko
Yet another web app that solves #firstworldproblems…

~~~
kadabra9
yet another douchebag with nothing constructive at all to add or any real
feedback in for a member who started this thread explicitly to obtain feedback
from HN

