

Build and Customize Your Own Hacker News, Reddit, or Product Hunt - mkaroumi
http://www.telescopeapp.org

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justaaron
not sure if telescope is a good boilerplate for meteor. I think it tends
towards unnecessary abstraction complication and ends up rather brittle in the
end. Try changing the post frequency from "daily", for example. The code
complexity, in this case, making a previously non-existing abstraction (post
frequency) difficult to alter... better to start with the basic meteor 3-file
default app (or something similarly simple) and build one's app (and
knowledge) from there... I'm a pretty experienced Meteor dev and I find
telescope to be confusing...

~~~
mkaroumi
Hmm... I understand. I've learned a lot using Telescope but I'm not an
experienced developer, but what do I know?

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daliwali
As a front-end developer, I cringed when I saw how much Telescope (or is it
Meteor?) relies on global scope. To see what I mean, inspect the window object
in their first example site [http://crater.io/](http://crater.io/)

    
    
      Object.keys(window).filter(x =>
        window[x] instanceof Function &&
        !/native code/.test(window[x].toString()))
    

120 user-defined global functions, and that is not counting all global
variables... yikes!

(edit: if you're using Chrome, `Object.keys(window).length` gives you 260)

~~~
sgdesign
That's a fair point, and definitely something that needs to be fixed. We've
been slowly refactoring the app into a better, more modular structure but
there's still a lot to do.

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mdotk
Does anyone have any alternatives for this type of product (ie create your own
reddit, hacker news, etc...)?

~~~
Veratyr
Well there's Reddit:
[https://github.com/reddit/reddit](https://github.com/reddit/reddit)

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curiously
great but I did not like the UI at all. it feels sluggish and too glamourized.
Part of reason what makes HN discuss so great is the lack of any UI. no flat
or glossy designs. Everythign is texty, so you focus on the text not the
buttons or peoples avatars.

Another minus is that its written in Meteor.

~~~
ciwolsey
So you're easily distracted. Most people aren't.

Is there something fundamentally wrong with Meteor I'm missing?

