Hello HN!
Less than a month ago, as we started hearing about city's bookstores closing down - a small community got together to list their city's bookstores and ways to help them.
It resulted in detailing their gift cards, ways to order through them and if you couldn't order anything - a way to increase their social media following.
I took the spreadsheet and a friend proficient in Glide apps, converted it to an app.
This app now has listings of 800 bookstores in 21 countries. I am looking for feedback on how to improve the app, what elements would you add to it and what information is redundant for you?
Can I request that you make your data available as Open Data? Maintaining a dataset like this is a lot of work, and if people make data sets available as Open Data then people doing this kind of work can reuse and help each other.
The ban, they say, will be finalized in 2025, when all farms in the country will be shut down. It’s unclear, at the moment, how this will affect the sale of fur (whether Norway intends simply to stop producing it).
Norway is a large fur producer with over 300 fur farms, with farms breeding and killing over 700,000 minks and 110,000 foxes every year — simply for their fur. They’re far from the largest manufacturer (that’d be China) but they aren’t the smallest either.
So do you count your work hours as 3 hours or 7? And curious, if you try and optimise for more 'real work' time? I feel I'm quite hard on myself and consider it unnatural if I read an article or even browse randomly at work.
A few months ago I had the feeling I get nothing done (programming), because of all the other stuff I had to do.
That is why I started tracking my time consumption on a half hour base. "If you want to control something you need to measure it" was my thinking.
The time tracking itself doesn't cost much time. Did it earlier for my private life for a few months.
The first weeks my average programming time was only 1.5h! I slowly got it up to 3h now.
But do I count it as 3h or 7h work?
Hm - As a student I sure had more time for programming itself.
But I actually get more work done now. I can much easier pursue multiple projects and delegate work to students.
It is just that I didn't (have to) see all the organizational stuff that needs to happen beside the programming itself as a student.
The other 4h I do valuable stuff. Some of it should imho be done by others, but we are currently a little bit short on staff..^^
It's a nice learning opportunity though.
So to answer your question: I would count the whole 7 hours.
How do you decide if it's work-related reading/browsing or not? So watching a music video on YouTube is clear but I'd say HackerNews is muddy, leaning towards entertainment. For example you need to sleep to work too, but that doesn't count. HN may provide general nourishment about latest tech news and have interested articles that elevate your general knowledge but hard for me to pin that down as hours worked. That's the problem with work today, it's not easily measurable, in the old fashioned way of thinking of work as putting caps on bottles I'm guessing most people do far less than they believe, I wouldn't be shocked if it was only a couple of hours for many.
Yea well you have to dig through a lot of trash to find the gems. But since it is part of the deal you need to take the time into account that you need to wander through the mud.
Officially I won't count the hours that I use for this at home. But at least for me that is definitely work related.
If you're not taking notes on it so you can access and use it later, it's likely just an idle interest. Reading's not the same as learning. Also if you would read it without getting paid, it's probably not work.
"I don't see that as being more crappy UX than the rest of the Goodreads design."
I've seen this mentioned a lot of times on various forums. GoodReads by design doesn't look as good as any other social service we use now. But I am curious, whether that can be something an incumbent service can work on.
Providing great design and with GoodReads functionality, would that work for the new service?
Affiliate is just working enough for me to pay the server bills (less than 100 USD). So here's the thing I'm noticing about Affiliate commissions - currently, the only way to get decent commissions is to have a lot of shelves that are popular. Its just 3 months of launch and due to lack of aggressive marketing of any kind, most of the shelves are just sitting there.
The ones that get popular are converting well. I still need to figure out if this can be made mainstream by chance.
Thanks a lot for your feedback. Reddit for books would definitely be more relatable to people on HN :)
You've suggested some serious interesting things.
Like giving the link to other shelves on which a book is. I currently don't have a book view because the site itself is very new and I want to validate if people really like the proposition as such. But this information can be integrated in the current shelf model too. I'm thinking something at the bottom of a shelf where the reader gets to see the other shelves that contain the same books.
Hearting of a shelf and the share on the right is indeed confusing people. Will do something about it sooner than later.
Thank you again for taking out the time to write your feedback :)
My pleasure and definitely agree some of the things I suggested go well beyond MVP. It is the blessing and the curse of getting product feedback that the second you do something interesting, people want a million more features ;-).
I've been working on ShelfJoy for quite sometime now. I've thought of ShelfJoy to be like buzzfeed for books where people can discover curated books on deep niche topics.
Curation is guided by algorithms in a few cases but finalised by an editor.
Wanted to know your feedback on this. If you think it works for you or not and what can I do to improve it.
It resulted in detailing their gift cards, ways to order through them and if you couldn't order anything - a way to increase their social media following.
I took the spreadsheet and a friend proficient in Glide apps, converted it to an app.
This app now has listings of 800 bookstores in 21 countries. I am looking for feedback on how to improve the app, what elements would you add to it and what information is redundant for you?