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Tell HN: Hacker News Watch
29 points by Maro on Sept 7, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 23 comments
http://hnwatch.scalien.com

Demo account: demo/demo

Hacker News Watch monitors submissions so you don't miss out on topics, comments and commenters relevant to you.

You add keywords (like a Google search) which are saved as permanent searches. Hacker News submissions and linked pages are monitored for your keywords. Results are delivered to your browser in real-time via a Google Reader type interface.

It's a release-early-release-often type release, so it's still rough around the edges (eg. broken on IEx.x). We'll work on features/bugs based on your feedback.

About the project: When we released Keyspace, our replicated key-value store, we would gladly have payed $10/mo. for a service to monitor the real-time web for comments about us, so we can quickly react and make connections. The existing sites ("social media monitoring") are not very good, so we started building our own. HNWatch is a HN-only toy version of this more general product, which is also our primary use-case for Keyspace development.

Hacker News Watch has been OK'd by pg.




I'm on this page: http://hnwatch.scalien.com/welcome.html

First, it won't let me use "old-gregg", then I use "oldgregg", I click "Register and Login" and nothing happens.

Edit: hitting enter on that form works. I guess the bug is that you don't re-enable submit after a user corrects his input.


"And this is as close as you can get to Baileys before your eyes get wet."


Thanks, we're fixing it.


Clickable link:

http://hnwatch.scalien.com


and you can also use guest/guest as a dummy login


Right now we don't support multiple sessions a la Gmail, except the demo/demo user, which is read-only, hence this is not an issue.

If you open a new session with the same user (eg. in another browser) the previous one will be logged out. If people use the guest/guest they will keep kicking each other out.


An alternate solution is to use http://searchyc.com and your favorite RSS reader e.g., http://rss.searchyc.com/searchyc?sort=by_date


Keystrokes would be great.

I use the "j" and "k" keys on google reader to go up/down.

Allowing me to export topic feeds to RSS (and into google reader) would also be helpful.


Thanks for the feedback. Keys and RSS are next in the task queue.


J and K keys now work.


(demo account) When I go to Watches > Feynman I see 5 matches. The third has "python" highlighted 4 times, but I don't see any mention of "feynman". That's confusing.

I'd rather not have "python" highlighted, since that is not in my selection at that time, even though it is in the global selection.

Otherwise it looks nice, but it goes against how I use HN. Lots of interesting things here don't match my "official" list of interests.


Just an idea: if you add "hacker news" as a keyword, you will get all the articles, and if you add your interests then the articles will be organized as well.


Thanks for the feedback. Our snippet generator kinda sucks at the moment, but we're working on it.


Hi, I think you'll lose a lot of potential users (like me) because your site requires registration.

Depending on your plans for the site, this may not be a big deal. However, can you explain the reasoning behind requiring registration


So we can keep your keywords apart from other user's keywords. I'm not sure what you mean!


What I meant (and said) is that many users will not use the site because it requires registration.


The site stores "permanent searches" per user and displays the results to the user after logging in on a Google Reader-like interface. Can you explain what's wrong with this? Perhaps you're saying we should let you define searches and export them as RSS so you can add them to your existing feeder?


IMO http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=808534 should be filed under Java and not Python


I think you need to add something on the front page there that lets people know that they need to register (and not just enter their HN username/password).


I wish people didn't enter their usernames and passwords on other web sites, whether the sites ask for it or not.


Good point, I added a message.


You might want to fix the formatting a bit on it. I just check it on my laptop (1024x768 resolution) and with FireFox 3.5 maximized, it's cut off and won't let me scroll to read the second line. There's a web developer plugin for Firefox that will let you resize the browser to common resolutions so you can see how the site will look on various screen sizes (and let you tweak your CSS so it works on all of them).


Thanks, fixed that interface bug.




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