I’m not going to lie here, I’m kind of nervous for feedback. Normally I love C&C, but I have put like 6+ months of my blood tears and soul into this app, so this time it’s somewhat nerve-wracking. I learned rails just to build this, and its my first ever ‘app’

I have noticed a trend in a lot of different places where people are always asking for tutorials and resources. There are blog posts.. places like OT or reddit for discussion, places like Stack Overflow for questions, but theres no centralized hub for RESOURCES. That is what I hope to solve.

Here it is,

The one confusing thing that you might encounter is the difference between a tutorial/tool/asset. Just mouse over near the top right of the screen and you will see a breakdown of what they are (just until I can really flesh out the about and FAQ pages).

Notable features are
– voting
– sorting resources based on hot ranking
– favoriting. Any resource you favorite will show up in your profile very nicely organized and broken down by topic (to avoid messy bookmark folder). Also the favorites are easily ‘filterable’
– easy signup/easy submitting (not forcing you to signup)
– comments

Keep in mind, I’m still seeding the initial resources. I still have over 1000 things to add that I have in one massive text file, before i really start advertising and promoting it hard. I will doing about 50+ per day if I can. In the meantime, I would love it if you could sign up and even add ONE thing (you can even submit stuff anonymously if you can’t be arsed to signup).

Maybe just add your favorite. If you don’t have time or feel like adding something, the biggest help would be even to just tell a friend about it if the situation arises, so I can get the word out.

PS: If anyone has good input for SEO im all ears, I did my best but that’s definitely not my specialty

Suggestions: I’m giving you my real honest opinion regardless of how much it hurts.

– The design feels outdated, it has too much going on, yet it’s simple to the point of where it’s too much white space.

– Make it so the black bar at the top scrolls with the page, so it doesn’t go away when you scroll down. When you get to the bottom there’s only a tiny home link to let you escape back.

– Move the submit new resource over to the left above the what’s hot. It feels randomly thrown to the right like it’s left out of the page.. Make this a web 2.0 button style with a bright blue that draws people to click. Similar to the green button at the top for sign ups.

– It’s always better to have a login with the forms shown, without having to click login and then logging in. 2 clicks vs. one. You want people to login and get on your site without having to think about it or wait.

– How are you going to fund this? I feel like when you click Github for mac (for example) it should go to an inner page with more information. Then you can go to the publisher’s website. Plus better for SEO and getting more pages indexed for people searching or these apps. Edit so I can only get to this page if I click on comments. Not a fan of that, should be able to get there once I click on the Dot-o-mator name, or title etc.

– Submit page easy enough but when I click paid, nothing shows up. How do I know what it costs. If I was a visitor, I’m not going to fill all of that out only to find it’s $30 or something I can’t afford to spend.

– Like the domain name, but what’s with the .io?

– I feel like the count of the tuts, tools, assets should be at the top above what’s not, etc. This makes a HUGE impression. If people visit your site and see you’ve got 1,000 things for them, they will want to stay and see what there is. I would relocate it to the bottom once the sit gets popular, but for now seems like it needs it since it’s too new.

Comments: But good work, keep at it! Coming together nicely..

– Also had no idea what this site was about till I hopped in myself and went for a test drive, I wish the text on the homepage for about the site was much bigger (on the top right). Something I could focus on right away and realize what exactly I’m here looking for. Seems to blend into the page to easily.

Awesome, I really appreciate the feedback. Lets see here

1. Duly noted

2. Good idea about the sticky bar. I added a little scroll to top thing that appears but maybe that’s not too visible.

3. wow, this is a superb idea. I didnt even think to put it in that little tab area…. definitely will think about doing that

4. not sure about that one, it may kind of cobble up the layout more (the login forms visible)

5. As for forcing them to the detail page, thats tricky. I wanted to be easy on the user and NOT force them to click a link… then click again, just to view it. I considered that but I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone using it. they want to browse, open a bunch of links to see what they are, and then if one is worth commenting on they can. i WAS thinking that name+"comments" would link to the detail page but the thumbnail would take you to the actual site. was gonna wait for input on that one though before i changed it.

6. Im not sure what you mean by this one, the site is free to use. That just asks whether the resource is paid or free, so when people are browsing they can skip stuff if they’re cheap and dont want to pay things. Thats for people that want to add content to the site, they just need to know if that resource is paid or free (or a bit of both). They should know this, as theyre the one adding it.

7. .io has been used a lot recently for tech names due ot the input output connotation. See redis.io as well as a huge list of other tech startups that use .io – its also a gTLD behind the scenes even though webmaster tools says its a ccTLD, and from reports ive heard it performs the same in SEO targetted ot the US.

Yes i really wanted to do all these things but im trying to be ‘nice’ to my users. I didnt think someone would want to see size 18px font every time they visit the site again once they know what its for. What do you think?

edit: one other thing im definitely going to do (next on my todo list) is to totally pimp out the about page. Its going to a headline and an easy to read paragraph, and a screenshot explaining all the main features and whatnot. This is the page id probably link to in my advertising campaigns and in forum threads, just because people need to see that first. It also cant really be on the homepage .. just imagine if stack overflow had a ‘homepage’, it would be very weird

noice

bookmarked this one!

hopefully you can keep out the cheese and provide good content like what you have now on there.

reminds me of:

and

but they have cheese

Thanks I had no idea those existed… i seriously searched high and low before I built it. Regardless, I think mine owns those.

I will moderate the fuck out of it. I want it absolutely cheeseless.

The somewhat problem i see though is it’s hard to get people to sign up and submit stuff.. Its tedious doing so much on my own, i will bite the bullet though because i feel so strongly that people need a GOOD resource aggregator, and i want to start it off right. Not for just a bunch of shitty articles, but real sites. The name of the game in my book is quality.

Ont he other hand if anyone has any tips on how to get people to add stuff that would be sweet… i implemented a ‘score’ system as prize-reward but its not a main feature of the site i dont think. maybe its not highlighted enough.

Jesus christ i just read on designbump that they had to shut down registration because of spam… thats depressing. i knew that was going to be an issue but ughhhh.

But actually thank you! This will be bookmarked, didn’t know sites like these existed. I’ll prob start visiting it daily as it’s relevant to what I’m looking for everyday.

That’s really the best news I’ve heard lately (that you guys bookmarked it). I’m going to put my heart on my sleeve a moment and just say I’ve had a lot of ups and downs making this. Mostly due to only ME being the one planning it out. No one had much feedback and I’m kind of a detail freak. I learned rails and spent so many nights staying up till 5 trying to plan every detail. There’s actually a lot of subtleties on the site you won’t notice until you use it, like if you search more than one tag it breaks it down by number of matches. Or there are some nice profile features, custom rss feeds, favorites being broken down by tag, custom tag entry, lots of little jquery subtleties here and there, nice form validation, fancy d3js graphs, etc. I mean even try moving your mouse over the logo to see it dance.

Either way lately I’ve felt like I’m going mad. I’m like am I crazy for building this. Will anyone use it? How can just one person manage all the decisions? I think I’ve questioned myself more during these 12 hour long bouts of programming this than my entire life.

I didn’t intend really for the site to jUST make money. Obviously I want it to make a lot but my main goal was to provide an absolutely superb service for something I was frustrated with the lack of.

Going by those links above tht just makes me ask myself again. I just looked at their advertising. They have 16,000 sign ups and advertising is only 130 a month. Am I missing something? Will a site like this really make that little money? Also I am now realizing the incredible problem of spam I will face. I guess thats a high quality problem but if I’m only making pennies a month that’s not exactly inspiring to be spending hours every day finding ways to fight spam.

Anyway I am done ranting. I usually go through this every day and them wake up have some coffee and say fuck doubt I will go at this for years adding stuff myself until it picks up.

TLDR; I will add stuff every day for you guys, even if its only me, so always check back

Some food for thought here… It’s not easy to get anybody to contribute, especially for free. Stack overflow found a way to make people want to do this. What do all tech people have in common? Ego’s. Look at the SO homepage… Cred #’s next to people’s names. This will be an important concept for you to key in on as you try to grow a strong user base.

There actually is a reputation score, thats calculated by all your resources upvotes. But, thats all there is is just a (52) next to your name. Not like a complicated flyout like SO. Thats a good idea to maybe put "Top users" or something… i didnt think of that

so you’re saying this was a pet project of yours to learn ruby?

It started as a pet project to learn ruby, yes, but then grew into something way more as I realized I could actually make something that would REALLY benefit people, so at that point I went really hard (I went HAM), and spent many hours trying to think of everything that would make this better for a user. Kind of to the point of obsession maybe. I dream of it having thousands of users. Pretty much since I learned html when i was 14 i wanted to make a site that tons of people use, it’s one of my "life goals" i guess, and I think this is the first time i actually thought of something that has a real shot at it.

By the way, ive been working on a lot of changes based on your suggestions, Ill push them live soon. It ‘reads’ much much better than it did before with only a few small minor tweaks.

Superb, I thought exactly the same thing.

I pushed a few changes. the yellow is really fucking yellow on the button.. im not a fan of that at all but everyone kept saying make it more visible

EDIT: Its too fucking annoying yellow i cant take it

EDIT: Fixed that shit

Excellent site idea… I signed up. It should introduce me to all sorts of resources that I might never have found otherwise and I’ll try to submit and share others that I find along the way.

Hows it been going? Hope you are doing well!

Is it hand coded or is it something like pligg? I had a pligg site and it got spammed to all hell and back. I pretty much abandoned it since it was too frustrating to clean up and/or block future spam.

You need to figure out how to describe what your site is about. You have a title, but in chrome it cuts off at "Tutorials"

It is entirely coded by hand. The only real bit of code I didn’t write is authentication which is handled by devise, and obvious thinks like the jquery token-input. All of the other things including the forum I wrote in ruby/rails from scratch

The one main problem with the site at this moment is the fact you can only search by tag. Currently I’m implementing a quite intelligent text-base search which will become the new default (as opposed to search-by-tag being the default). I have it about 90% implemented locally, but I am still tweaking the elasticsearch algorithm to make it captures the most relevant data based on past searches I have seen. IE, stemming on plural words, etc. Elasticsearch is really complex so it’s taking awhile, I’d expect it will be up in a week.

Also my serps and userbase is growing, slowly but solid. I’m also completely redoing the admin area to allow for better moderation. Overall it’s coming along very nicely, much better than I was expecting.

Unfortuantely I haven’t gotten much spam yet. I say unfortunately because it hasn’t really allowed me to brace for impact (it will happen, I’m just working away though in the meantime trying to prepare).

I’m really not wanting to put captchas, etc… but I know eventually I will have to, as well as remove anonymous resource submissions. In the meantime though I’m fixing the admin area to implement some nice site-wise moderation/banning features, etc.

If anyone with experience on dealing with high-volume spam has input how a site like mine could reduce spam I’m all ears. The most I’ve had so far was fake users which are very easily spotted and deleted.

I don’t really have much use for the site(right now), but I bookmarked it and will share on my Facebook.

I’ll look into it a bit deeper and see if I can offer any insight when I catch some time, though.

awesome