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by fsav 6323 days ago
Me and Aneesh have been working hard on an idea I described here a few weeks ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=450810): a site where you propose small coding projects and others can join. The goal is meeting new people and sharing tips while working on fun ideas. We've added a voting twist: you can vote for ideas, and then showcase completed projects on your blog for people to vote up.

We think some of you will be directly interested in this, and we hope for your feedback:

http://www.clusterify.com

Thanks to all who helped/are helping/will help us!

2 comments

I really like the idea, so much so that I jumped through all of the hoops and added my own project: http://clusterify.com/projects/list/TimothyFitz/9/

Unfortunately, there were a lot of hoops! I had to register. Once registered I wasn't logged in?! I confirmed my e-mail then logged in, then clicked new project. Most of this went well except for the tags, where the auto-complete broke (would show the tag I had just typed, over the textbox I'm trying to type into). That might just be a Google Chrome issue?

My $0.02: You should optimize the hell out of the new user -> adding a project loop and the new user -> joining a project loop. User accounts are stupid and antiquated. Have the add project field use the same fields that wordpress comments use (name, e-mail, optionally website). Defer dealing with misuse (hopefully defer it until you're popular!)

OK so the registering process should now be much easier (for better or for worse -- we'll deal with misuse as it shows up, as you said). It's not as good your comment and shimon's propose, but it should at least be much faster: no activation, direct to profile.
This is why I <3 HN.

Go to a website, comment on it and watch your feedback be used to evolve the website... in under half an hour! There are even comment threads where PG has a <5min read-hack-deploy-announce cycle on HN itself.

Well I still wanted to smoke test it locally before deploying the change, so < 5 mins would have been a bit hard :P
Thanks TimothyFitz, we hear you. Sounds like we need to make the process a bit smoother for new users.
I imagine it was the inspiration for the site design but it's worth noting that your design is very reminiscent of stackoverflow. That's not a bad thing, however, because it looks great and very usable. Thanks for this!
Indeed :P The design is directly inspired by StackOverflow's (so bad that we mentioned it in the about page).