[lix2333]

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.

[joelrunyon]

You could pull together different courses and show how they complement each other to create tracts.

Sure, you can just organize them and leave them as they are right now and let people pick what they want, but if you vetted the courses and had suggested tracts to send people through, that could be pretty valuable.

[lix2333]

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."

Is that what you had in mind?

[joelrunyon]

I'm thinking of it as a guidebook or as a course, for all the courses out there (if that makes any sense).

So, wow, there are a ton of free resources out there - here's how to aggregate them, and utilize each of them most effectively with all the other free resources out there.

[natep]

I really like the idea of the site, and the mission to limit the number of things on it. Too many options, and I just get choice paralysis.

However, to be frank, I don't know who you are, so why should I trust your recommendations? I wouldn't mind if you were the only person to decide what gets posted, but I would like to see content from users, primarily tags, votes, and comments. This might also increase user engagement.

You could also make it "social" if you wanted. Allow users to publicly commit to doing a certain tutorial X hours per day/week, and you track that from when they click through your site to the tutorial site, and then they check back in when they're done. Or it could be complete honor system. I wouldn't worry too much about people lying, because really, they'd just be hurting themselves.

[lix2333]

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.

[aeturnum]

Right now you have short descriptions about the sites in the alt text. Consider adding an expandable section for each link that has: the short description from the alt text, maybe a "for people who like..." (or "for people who don't like...") pointer for users to understand the philosophy of a resource.

I think the problem with users coming once or twice is that taking the time to understand and try a resource is a lot of work. With only the bare links, they have no way to use their previous experience to judge the other resources without another significant investment.

You could also ask users to vote "works for me" and "doesn't work for me" and then display those votes when a user registers theirs. You could also use those votes to track the utility of each link to users.

[pirateking]

This is just a random idea, but how about a scheduler? A lot of times when I am self-educating, I find myself hitting a search engine or Wikipedia and getting sidetracked indefinitely. Soon I stumble across another amazing site and any hope of focus is lost.

Fitting in with the title of your site ("No Excuse List"), allowing a user to create a list of to-dos on a per site basis with due dates, could be pretty cool. Although I am hesitant of yet another to-do list manager...

[duopixel]

Great site, I think I had seen it before (in Reddit?). I like it just the way it is, no nonsense carefully curated list of things to learn online.

I feel weary of changing any of this, but if you want users to come back a good feature would be listing the starting dates for upcoming courses. Coursera and Udacity courses have specific launch dates, you can use this information for a more "what do I want to learn next week" experience.

[zubairshams]

Here's a link to an excellent music, (primarily guitar) learning class that does not get much attention in the North America: http://www.guitarmasterclass.net/. Consider adding this to you list. I appreciate the effort at building a website of curated links by the way.

[spicyj]

A small note: "The Khan Academy" should just be "Khan Academy", and "DuoLingo" should be "Duolingo".