I guess there's a couple of reasons why I haven't gone that route:
1) I'm not technically skilled. I work as a banker, so in order to make some of these changes, I'd have to find someone who can do it who I trust. I'll most likely start searching some freelance boards to implement some of the ideas I got today from HN users.
2) I don't want the 'social' aspect to seem forced. Giving people the ability to create accounts to track their favorites or to track how many hours they've studied is an interesting idea, but I'm thinking about how many people would actually use it. I think I will try to go to route of providing a better interface / search system to give users a better experience, then go into the social aspect as the site gains popularity.
Thanks a lot of the comment though. Gave me something to think about. Why would people trust what I recommend? Great question.
Yes, that happens to be the only one I have at the moment. I have 2-3 photography ones that fit under art as well... I was also looking for art history for my own interests, and that seems to be hard to come by too.
Hey, thanks for the link. I've looked pretty hard for sites that teach cooking and they're pretty hard to come by! The cooking for engineers has been the best one that I've seen. Its surprising that there's not better resources. I didn't want to have to start linking to youtube channels...
Thanks for the suggestions. I agree with you on all of those points. I think for the next version, it would be great to have icons and more of a description.
As of right now, if you hover over the link, it'll explain what the website is focused on and what it generally covers.
I'm a big fan of Memrise. I think one of the best features is that it uses the community to suggest ways of remembering a word. People remember things differently, so if you have to see a picture of a baby crying with his mouth open to remember that the word 口 means mouth, then so be it.
I'm hoping duolingo comes out with their Chinese track soon. That'll be very interesting.
This is basically what I was thinking about doing earlier.
"This is actually something I was thinking about. For instance, say someone wants to learn Ruby. They could go to noexcuselist and find a step-by-step process that someone has made using only free resources. Does that sound like something that would be useful? The hard part is, I'd have to expand the site and make it social, so people can post their own guides. I definitely don't have the technical expertise for that."
I agree with you on 'picking one' and sticking to it. Maybe I should highlight one source for each that I strongly recommend or something?
Also, thanks for the heads up about the Dreamspark link. Looks like windows recently redirected it to the same site. You used to be able to download Windows 7 and other resources for free as a student...
This is actually something I was thinking about. For instance, say someone wants to learn Ruby. They could go to noexcuselist and find a step-by-step process that someone has made using only free resources. Does that sound like something that would be useful? The hard part is, I'd have to expand the site and make it social, so people can post their own guides. I definitely don't have the technical expertise for that.
Hey guys, I'm the creator of the site. Thanks for posting it Joel!
I've been trying to delicately balance the line between too many links versus not enough links. I created this site in the first place because I had seen tons of these "best places to learn online" compilations, but all of them had about 200 links. Way too many to actually be useful.
So I sought out to create something where there were only a few websites per category, but you could trust that they were all the best the web has to offer. As you can see from some of the comments on here, it's a fine line between too many and too few. I keep finding new ones that I think are too good not to include.
I've been thinking lately about how I can make this site more useful to my users. It seems like most people come once or twice, see a link they like and don't come back until the next time they want to learn something. Although you could argue that's basically what the site is designed to do, I would like to see more repeat users. Any ideas? I have a few in mind already, but I wanted to see what the general consensus was.