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Ask LN: Library News feature requests?
6 points by brett 536 days ago | 9 comments
As a Hacker News addict, I'm really excited about the possibility of having a similar community for people interested in libraries.

I think the primary reason for HN's success has been the careful stewardship of the community by its founder, Paul Graham. While my guess is that no one at Library Cloud/Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory is in position to play the PG role, I think it may make sense to adapt some lessons from HN. For instance, there's a link to Feature Requests in the footer of each page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

Until there's an equivalent at LN, maybe we can use this thread as a place to gather them. Here are my top choices:

* A mobile version of LN, perhaps something like http://www.icombinator.net, which I prefer to http://hn.gethifi.com/ and http://ihackernews.com/

* Search: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=&start=0

* A page to Ask LN: http://news.ycombinator.com/ask



4 points by gbonanome 536 days ago | link

Glad to see this thread!

* +1 to Search capabilities

* +1 to the AskLN page

* also the Guidelines page will be useful http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* a quick link to http://news.librarycloud.org/best in the top menu (or all the lists shortcuts http://news.librarycloud.org/lists in a footer)

* an Hacker News Daily (http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/) equivalent

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1 point by matt 536 days ago | link

Excellent. Keep them coming.

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3 points by matt 536 days ago | link

Love the feature requests idea, brett.

Keep the feature requests coming.

Let's keep the feature requests/bug fixes in this thread (HN style).

How about we put a link to this thread in the FAQ page (http://news.librarycloud.org/faq) instead of in a footer? I like the idea of being footerless, but if that's a turnoff, let me know.

Thanks.

(I'm Matt Phillips. I work in the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and have done most of the technical work to get LN off the ground. I'll also be the guy to implement new features/bug fixes. If you need me directly, find me at mphillips@law.harvard.edu)

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1 point by brett 536 days ago | link

Matt, thanks for all the work you're doing in our behalf. Even though the community is new, it's obvious how much enthusiasm and good judgement you're bringing to LN.

I like the idea of linking to this thread in the FAQ page, at least for now. At some point digging through this thread might be too cumbersome for newcomers, but when that happens it will be a good problem to have.

As for remaining footerless, I like the idea of keeping the interface minimal, but it would be useful to make sure we're meeting the needs of folks who are completely new to an HN-style community, people who have expectations that LN will be exactly like HN, and everyone else in between. Maybe an alternative to copying PG's interface would be to adapt the interface categories that Maciej Cegłowski has created for Pinboard:

Howto: http://pinboard.in/howto/

Resources: http://pinboard.in/resources/

At Pinboard, there's also a FAQ, Tour, About statement, TOS, and others -- enough to justify links in a header and a footer, even though Pinboard's interface is pretty minimal -- but those two categories seem to be the most important in terms of figuring out what's going on and how to get the most from the website.

One other suggestion: Matt, it would be great if you would add more information to your LN profile page. And if you would get others at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab to do so as well.

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2 points by BillDrew 536 days ago | link

Fix the news feed. This how a link comes out in Google Reader:

http://news.librarycloud.orgitem/?id=168

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1 point by matt 536 days ago | link

Good catch. Adding this to the bugfix queue.

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2 points by brett 536 days ago | link

Would it be possible to make the bugfix queue public?

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1 point by andendau 498 days ago | link

Why is this still broken?

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1 point by brett 495 days ago | link

Once search is implemented, it would be great to have the functionality built into this bookmarklet...

http://elias.kg/post/15568386753/alreadyhn

...merged into the existing LN bookmarklet.

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