Show HN: my weekend project, Quotably
Really cool idea (and nice design). I know it was a weekend project so I bet most of my feedback are things you've already considered, but here it is:
1) It's a little hard to tell the source of the quote from just the thumbnail, unless you recognize the cover. I think there should be a title above the quote that includes Book and Author (in addition to the thumbnail of the cover)
2) It's such a cool concept, but I'd like to be able to browse by books (business books, psychology books, fiction, literature, best sellers, etc).
3) Make the page more dynamic, so you don't need to refresh the page every time you call for a new quote. This will make it much nicer/enticiing to quickly scroll through quotes. The refresh creates a bit of friction
4) Make it easier to tweet/share it out. You have a tweet/pin button in the corner, but I would integrate it into the quote box. If it's a good quote, I want to post it to other places
Nice app and concept...the most-highlighted passages feature of Amazon is definitely something worth mining.
My first reaction: Is it really necessary to load a 2.33MB background for this? Even on a fast connection, the background-image-load stuck out like a sore thumb, clashing with the otherwise smooth operation of the site.
This is great. I hope you get some sort of referral payment for linking back to books for purchase on Amazon. A site like this could inspire a lot of people to buy a lot of new books.
I recommend allowing users to pick from a set of categories to filter quotes from genres they want to highlight/ignore. For instance, I would be interested in seeing highlighted passages from fiction novels without running into a bunch of self-help or religious passages.
As a further step, this would be a perfect implementation of social media advertisements. The most popular passages serve as a good advertisement for books. If you have a little widget that shows a random book and favourited passage, with the ability to cycle through to others, any website could host this interactive advertisement and see a portion of revenues from the amazon kindle purchases.
Keep it up, you're on to something here.
'"Quotably" shares the most highlighted quotes from the Amazon Kindle'
^ excellent tag line. Explains exactly what I'm looking at. Good job. Nice idea.
That's a nice app you have come up with. I like it. Here are some suggestions to create a better experience:
1. Use of arrow keys to navigate between the quotes will deliver a much better experience to the users. 2. Providing the users with a filter to browse books by different categories, authors etc. will prove to be a better discovery platform. 3. Use AJAX to load the quotes instead of reloading the page every-time.
I really like this site, I could see it becoming a homepage for people. I would suggest adding button to automatically set it as a homepage for people. Also, I would like to see the social features become all white for a cleaner look. I'm not sure if non-tech users will still be able to identify them though so it would require some A/B testing.
Very nice UI. This one is hilarious:
The app is really cool, there's lots of room for design flair with this.
I was a little disheartened to see so many religious quotes, the same book (persuit of god) came up three times, and there were others too, I'd say half of them were religious.
I think the idea is great, but the content would be better if the quotes were from fiction rather than self-help and faith based books.
looks really nice! I just felt that some minor animation would have given it a better feeling, for example when I changed quote a fade would have been nice. I also feel like that a slightly moving background would give an amazing feeling, the image looks great and I really gives me a sense of moving. I'm not sure why but this is what I feel.
I really like the design and the interface, nice work. One thing I found a little confusing is that if you go "back" and then "forward", the "forward" action seems to load a random quote instead of returning to the one you were on.
https://kindle.amazon.com/most_popular - simple interface, aggregated view with different filters.
I've toyed with the idea of a social quote site or some basic paid software to create pretty quotes, and I love that you've included a Pinterest button. I think it would work better, if you were able to generate an image that could be pinned on Pinterest instead, though.
The image doesn't have to be shown; the bookmarklet/share button could probably detect a `display: hidden` image instead. Although that would add to the bandwidth footprint.
really cool and nice. I will just add that you can use Amazon Associates to tag the links to the books and earn a few dollars out of it.
Make it a screensaver and I will download it.
I don't always find weekend project to be as fancy but this one is exception. Good job, I really like its simplicity!
Beautiful design.
To my eye (and my personal taste), the book image should be valign=top. With the longer quotes, the book image at the middle looks strange.
Also, again with the longer quotes, the blue links are difficult to read on that dark/grassy field background. The grey "from" is basically illegible.
I'm using Chrome 22.0.1229.94 m.
Great work, though!
Why not also add a plugin that can collect quotes from web-pages with a right-click? I think that's what quote.fm and quotevault.org sort of already do. But you could make a kind of flickr for quotes: quotedesk and have it feed pc desktops or a toolbar display.
I'd like to see a blog post in a month to show how much affiliate revenue you've made from this.
It is a very nice site, clean and elegant. Can you share the technology behind this?
Great attempt. You did what 99% of people don't do - take action.
Having said that, did you begin your project with the end in mind. Who is your paying customer(target market) and what is your revenue model?
There was a great quote, I clicked left, and it went to the previous quote, then right, and it went to a new quote with the one I liked gone.
Maybe a grooveshark or youtube-like playlist would work.
Bug report: http://quotab.ly/924/influencer-the-power-to-change-anything
The thumbnail is wrong.
Nicely done. Simple neat idea and the execution is perfect. :)
Looks great! The background image is really nice too. It would be cool if it would correlate somehow with the quote that is being presented.
Something similar with an interesting mashing feature: http://wisbit.akeelali.com/
Fantastic weekend project. @patrickambron 's suggestions are the best because they're the simplest.
I love simple and elegant apps like this! Kudos and I wish you to keep it growing! Shared...
Nice job! The site looks so clean and simple. Did you use an API to get quotes?
Very cool. I just bought a book because of this. Nice work!
Absolutely beautiful. Great job
nice design! i hope the amazon affiliate revenue will pay the .ly domain :P
Watch out for the fact that most quote websites consist of bogus quotes. Wikiquote is good though.