HN on StoryLine – historic news browser | Hacker News Reader

HN on StoryLine – historic news browser

storyline.im

89 pointsantulik31 comments

StoryLine is my pet project. If you have any questions I'm happy to answer them. It's still in early stages and I'm keen to hear your feedback.

Cool project.

For the "tutorial", I read through maybe the first 3 boxes, then got tired and clicked until I could explore it myself. I bet it's the same for most users (feel free to measure to get real data). If you can, defer teaching to mouseovers and other hints in the UI.

Same here. Another option is to offer an option to end/cancel the tutorial next to the "Next" button.

I can confirm the exact same thing happened to me.

This is very similar to something I've been looking for/thinking of building for some time. I took a look around but browsing was very slow for me so I'll just ask here; do you have any plans for training filters? That is, feeding it data about what sort of thing you read (and on what basis; software announcements I might click on daily, but if I haven't checked in for a month I'll only check more serious articles / deep discussions) to get personalized results.

Personalised priorities are definitely in the plans, probably not in the nearest future as I want to refine core features first.

Completely understandable, as that would be a pretty major step. Going back I now see the more/less/read buttons which could benefit from going in that direction. Good luck!

It looks like it's progressing well.

One quick thing I noticed is that the thumbnails show up, even if there is no article for them: http://i.imgur.com/QrLZuxF.png

yeah, it's by design because that part was changed not that long ago. Before lines were crossing each other, so had to change the logic of what news to show on the right. I agree with you, it does look confusing with empty boxes, will need to fix it up. Thanks for the feedback.

You can see previous version here http://blog.storyline.im/4/post/2013/01/first-reddit-integra...

Hey, great job man. Not often a site distracts me for as long as this one did :)

In the initial tour, are the "top moments" hard-coded or actually being generated? Seeing "Aaron Schwartz Commits Suicide" in huge letters at the top of the column had me closing the tab rapidly.

Top moments are generated based on your current view and what you haven't marked as read. "Aaron Schwartz Commits Suicide" post got a lot of points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5046845

Pretty nice. I had a similar idea a while ago but not using "spheres", and this works well, well done.

UI wise, the lines crossing each other when you select a sphere is not very elegant. WHy dont you make the news you select appear on the left, while keeping the suggested news on the right ? That would look so much better, and be less confusing for the user.

And the tutorial was a bit too long. I would rather have in-line help than a mandatory tutorial.

one more thing, there is little to no value of providing a pre-visualisation of the web page. It would be so much more useful to provide the first few lines of the articles. There are libraries to scrap articles that do that very well.

A quick request, too: having a link to share a selected period/view would be great. That way you could share with friends a specific period of time/news that you find interesting.

I had exactly the same thought. It's very useful for the users and a nice chance to boost popularity.

I like the idea of showing selected items on the left, will need to think how it would work with narrow 1024px browsers. Perhaps selected news could float on top of the graph.

and I agree article preview or abstract would be definitely more useful, will look into it. Thanks for the feedback.

You're welcome. I may have more suggestions about overall design. Let me know if you want to reconnect offline.

that would be great, I still don't have any designers involved in the project so the current version is very simplistic, pretty much the best I could do.

you can find me on twitter @antulik

Instead of clicking each individual bubble, I wish there was a line which u can drag on top that will show the articles on the right as it passes the bubbles

that's a good idea, probably will do it in the nearest future. Thanks for the feedback

Great Job. Some questions, in no particular order:

1. What was your inspiration for the project?

2. You mentioned it was your pet project, how long did it take to develop once you got started?

3. What is the tech stack it is built on?

4. How much data do you have in it now that it is visualizing from, and can you talk about the process of how it determines what to display, refreshes view, etc.

5. I notice that there is a "login" option, and the ability for users to create "calendars". Can you give a brief summary / pitch of where you would like to see this go?

6. What is your favorite flavor of cupcake?

7. What is your favorite type of cheese?

I'll answer only the first and the last questions (:

Inspiration http://s23.photobucket.com/user/NRGrush/media/ZX-10R%20Custo...

not sure about cupcakes, but blueberry muffins would be my choice, I just assume you are a cupcake manufacturer and perform customer analysis.

As for the rest I should probably write a small blog post to sum up all of that. In short server is ruby on rails, client is mostly emberjs + d3js. I also post updates on StoryLine blog, so check it out, it should give you an idea on progress of things. http://blog.storyline.im/

Thanks for the reply, despite your choice of muffin over cupcake ;-)

Looking forward to following the storyline progress.

"Some people like cupcakes better. I,for one, care less for them."

Very nice project. Are you planning to add any other sites?

Yes, is there any sites you would like to see there first?

I've started with Google Calendar, then Twitter, then Reddit and now HackerNews. HackerNews so far is the best dataset to start with. Reddit integration is half done, but still not sure on subreddits because there are too many of them.

I was thinking about Reddit - because it's so big that I never find enough motivation to browse it. Your interface is much more pleasant and encouraging so I'll be looking forward to try Storyline with Reddit. Thanks!

It doesn't appear that you can sign up?

not at the moment, I should probably be more explicit about that. I removed registration to simplify the process for new visitors. And you still can keep track of news you've read.

this needs to work with the leap. Cool idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com