Comment by jrowen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrowen | Hacker News Reader

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Hey HN,

I love learning how to do things on YouTube. It's amazing - empowering, really - that we can instantly look up how to do so many things. When I looked around for a site dedicated to organizing and curating this content, I didn't find much, so I took a stab at it. The goal of the site is to make it easy to browse through and discover videos on different topics.

After implementing the basic experience and authoring tools, I spent weeks combing through videos to get the collection started, and I've only scratched the surface. Many areas of interest remain to be added, and to that end, users can submit videos to the database and make other contributions. If the idea resonates it could become a useful resource.

You don't need to register for the main experience of viewing the videos, only to contribute new ones, and email is optional.

A demo video can be found here: https://youtu.be/EpWfvu0p5lA

Thanks!

Great idea, thanks. One potential problem I see is that categories seem too broad, you cover a lot of area here. There's so much good content out there that very quickly just 2 levels won't be enough to categorize it into a browsable lists. The same problem most of us have with bookmarks, at some point there's so many of them that you can't find anything anymore.

Yes, definitely. As the database grows I would have to add a third level, at least. Probably sections within the large pane that would fold out.

Creating a useful hierarchy and keeping it balanced is one of the bigger challenges of the project.

I wonder if this shouldn't be in some wiki-format instead...

This is fantastic, you have a great curation so far. Would it be possible to create an RSS feed of new videos/categories that are added?

Thanks, I'm open to it, but I have no experience with that. Any pointers on where to get started with that?

RSS and atom are simple xml formats that encapsulate information about posts or items on a site. They are linked on the site with meta tags or in direct a links. Here's a link to some documentation: https://www.xul.fr/en-xml-rss.html#structure

Your framework will also likely have helpers to generate those. And you can contact me directly for help, email is in my profile.

I love the look of this page. Great job.

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