I voted you down because I thought it was spam, sorry. I've undone my vote now so you are back to 0. When I voted there was just one item with a link, and it looked like someone just wanted to advertise their online store.
Your article seems fine for the site. An optimum article would be more than just a list of links though.
Ideally, I want articles to become full-fledged, comprehensive articles. Like the article for "Reasons to Quit Smoking". In time, I hope that article can become a comprehensive resource of all the best reasons to quit smoking. Then someone who is trying to quit smoking can use that article as motivation to quit.
I'll be working on a commenting system so that in the future it'll be easier to discuss this type of thing on the actual article page.
Thanks for trying out the site and providing feedback! And sorry again for thinking it was spam.
Thanks. I'll probably write about the implementation once I get some spare time. I got a lot of great feedback today that I'll be busy implementing for a while :)
I was debating between calling them "lists" or "articles", and decided on "articles" because my hope is that over time they will become full-fledged articles (true that my domain name makes that a bit confusing). Paul Graham's article on "the 18 mistakes that kill startups" (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) is the type of article I am shooting for with Listry. Where each item of the article has 1 or more in-depth paragraphs of explanation or details.
I just felt the need for that a few minutes ago, a troll overwrote all of the articles with junk text, and I had no way to easily block his IP. I'll be working on that ASAP.
I've seen that site before. Mine's more about creating comprehensive articles rather than just a list. Something where each item of the article has paragraph(s) of detail.
Should I keep the 5 star rating control for rating articles, and change the voting on items to thumbs up/down? Or should I change both the voting on items and voting on articles to thumbs up/down?
Thanks! Spam edits can be reverted in the history tab, there's still more work I need to do to make that easier though. Spam articles can be voted down, and that will take them off the front pages, and I can manually delete them. I'll probably need to have a "flag article" link down the road though.
Your other article, "Best Text Editors for Programming", is a perfect article for Listry I think. The Cambridge coffee shops one would be good if there were a lot of Listry users that lived in Cambridge and could vote on it, I'm not sure there are enough though.
Your feature request is a good idea, I'll keep it in mind for down the road.
Thanks :). I see what you are talking about, it's because the main page is long enough to have a scrollbar, and then when you choose a category, there isn't enough content to need to show a scrollbar, right?
One reason could be if you wished there was good resource on a topic.
For example, if you wanted to convince someone that they should develop for iOS instead of android, you could start an article on Listry titled "Reasons to develop for iOS". Then add a few reasons of your own to the article, and then other Listry users could add their reasons, everyone would vote on the best reasons, and then in the end you would have a good resource of all the best reasons to develop for iOS.
A reputation system would definitely be a good thing to have too. I was thinking about creating one, but decided to launch early, and then improve the site over time.
Right now the popular tab sorts things based on the votes for the article, and also the votes for the items within the article. So an article with good items can rank higher than an article with more votes, but no items.
Right now there isn't any time-component to the popular articles. I was thinking of having sub-tabs for "popular this week", "popular this month", and "popular all time", and then having the default be "popular this month".
For crap articles, people can vote them down, which will move them lower on the new articles tab and popular articles tab if they are voted low enough. Also, I can manually delete obviously crap articles, or close articles that don't fit the format.
For crap edits, they can be undone in the history tab of each article. I need to do a little work in making rollbacks easier though.
If I get a lot of traffic, I'll have to write some software to help identify malicious edits.
Thanks for noticing the speed :) I spent a lot of effort on that.
I built my own mini-framework for Google App Engine with a focus on speed. The main thing that makes it fast is that it utilizes public edge caching for most content, and the parts of the content that change from user to user are updated with javascript.
So with the home page, App Engine just serves a static page from it's edge cache, which is updated every 30 seconds, and the top bar of the site which is different if you are logged in is updated with javascript to show you different links if you are logged in.
It uses my own mini-framework for Google App Engine. This comment has more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803