Ask HN: Review my site, nice-entity.com

[shawn_allison]

http://www.nice-entity.com

Longtime reader, first time submitter.

I've just launched Nice Entity. Basically, it's a resource for web designers and developers to quickly and easily look up character references.

Yes, there are already a lot of sites out there that do this, but they either:

A) look awful, B) are poorly organized, C) not as complete as I hope my site is.

Any feedback and/or critique would be most welcome.

Thanks in advance!

[ugh]

I would change the hover color. This will not really be a problem for many users, but with the default OS X selection color – combined with your hover color – entity selections are very hard to see. Since many will want to copy the entities from your site this could be problematic. You could change the hover color to grey or something like that. (This is less a problem with your site and more one with OS X behavior: selection colors shouldn’t be hard to see, no matter the background.)

One more thing: It really breaks my heart that this site – of all sites – uses wrong quotation marks. It’s “Find your character!”, not "Find your character!" (Whether or not it is appropriate to use quotation marks for claims like this is certainly also debatable.)

[shawn_allison]

Thanks very much for bringing this issue of the OS X selection colour to my attention! Based on your feedback I am going to change the table hover colour to be a shade of grey.

I also feel mortified that, of all things, I did not wrap the site's tagline in proper quotation marks. This will be remedied!

Thanks again for your feedback.

[mbrubeck]

It looks great! A search box seems like an obvious useful feature (even though the dataset is small enough to browse through for the most part).

Edited to add: Shouldn't " and ' appear somewhere? Yes, real quotation marks should be preferred in typography, but straight quotes are extremely common and sometimes appropriate (e.g. in source code) and it's necessary to escape them inside of HTML/XML attributes. And yes, I know ' has compatibility problems that should be made clear somehow...

[shawn_allison]

Thanks for your feedback!

In regards to the issue of ' I didn't include it based on compatibility issues and this article's opinion http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2003/07/01/the_curse_of_apos/

I did totally forget to include " and it will be added in an update later today.

A search box may be something I will implement in the future, but for now I do feel the dataset is small enough that people should be able to find what they need quickly enough. The suggestion is noted though.

Thanks.

[mbrubeck]

Why not list apostrophe as ' and include a link to that article? If you omit it, users will just look it up somewhere else and maybe get it wrong.

[shawn_allison]

I've updated the site and done as you suggested. Thanks for the advise!

[c_allison]

Very nice. Points for cleanliness. I'm running Chromium on Win7 RC1 (SRWare Iron specifically) and I'm getting blocks for the quotes in the sub title “Find your character!”

Also couldn't ignore your last name, Allisons win :D

[shawn_allison]

Thanks letting me know!

I've decided to take the quote marks off the tagline to just make life easier. Regardless of browser, there should be no issues now with text rendering in any of the main parts of the site template. (Fingers crossed)

[tdoggette]

Dashed URLs are internet ghettos.