On: Show HN: My weekend project to learn Javascript - ...

[petercooper]

Nice implementation, but Pinterest works well from a UX perspective because it's visually oriented and scanning scattered visuals works. Scanning scattered text, however, is harder than scanning a list :-(

Definitely time well spent learning JavaScript though so it will be cool to see it improve.

[jcampbell1 → petercooper]

I agree that this is an impressive way to practice javascript, and a UX mistake. The best way to understand Pinterest is to think of it as porn for women. Pinterest works because deciding if you are attracted to something takes zero cognitive effort and the scattering makes the required text less bothersome.

[davj → petercooper]

thanks, good point. i will be adding visuals, continuing my JavaScript learning spree. any recommendations on using js to take snap shots?

[petercooper → davj]

It's possible: https://github.com/niklasvh/html2canvas

But.. I'm not sure it's going to work out too well. You'd probably do better off using a service like http://webthumb.bluga.net/home but it gets complicated quickly (although it's been a cpl years since I looked into this so things may have come along).

[davj → petercooper]

awesome, i'm looking into both right now

[blazzar → davj]

If you don't mind paying a little, I have used http://url2png.com/ for one of my sites and it works great.

[davj → blazzar]

yeah, I've checked them out - what's ur site?

[joshfraser → davj]

it's also worth looking at PhantomJS for generating the screenshots yourself

[davj → joshfraser]

thanks man, PhantomJS is looking pretty promising.

[samstave → davj]

Can you give details on what resources you used to learn JS and build this?

[davj → samstave]

I spent a ton of time on stackoverflow, quora, w3schools, api.jquery.com, and google. I also bugged my developer friends when I got really stuck. i also used bootstrap from twitter (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/).