01 Apr 2004 | Gordon said...

Looks good - might need to make the sponsor links a bit more obvious (background color maybe?) otherwise it's pretty straightforward to use and easy on the eye.

01 Apr 2004 | CM Harrington said...

Interesting site. Quite a bit of potential.

The "Did you know" blocks at the top get a bit obnoxious after awhile.. perhaps they should go away after the first time you click on a location.

Or, you could look at it this way, If were I am has to be explained in a paragraph, then they should consider making it more obvious in their navigation

01 Apr 2004 | Eamon said...

Those panels on the home page ("Discover...", "Get started...", "Sign up now") need some linkage. The second panel actually has a call to action ("get started") and no link whatsoever. The third has a link around the star, but has text that looks like a link ("sign up") and isn't.

01 Apr 2004 | JF said...

Those panels on the home page ("Discover...", "Get started...", "Sign up now") need some linkage.

Yeah, we didn't do that page. We just did the main blog template page (the one where you read, etc).

01 Apr 2004 | nolan ryan said...

Haha - April Fools! You really got me good this time! Gosh, I feel so dumb now.

01 Apr 2004 | pb said...

A web site seems like a poor venue to aggregate feeds. Feed reading seems to require dedicated client software to get much out of it.

01 Apr 2004 | Hass said...

"Visitors can browse items on topics, everything from food to sex." Add sleep and I'm covered.

01 Apr 2004 | Noel D. Jackson said...

Hover bug on the front page in Safari.

01 Apr 2004 | Andrew said...

I thought 37express was intended for redesigns, not new product development.

01 Apr 2004 | Hugh said...

Give me the option to remove "Gay" off the Editor's Digest list.

01 Apr 2004 | Mike said...

Hey Andrew, here's a quote I pulled from the 37express page:

37express is perfect for companies that need one more design comp, rapid professional prototyping of a wireframe or early-design concept, or just a quick, hassle-free, "how could this page be better?" creative spark.

I think the second thing that "37express is perfect for" answers your question. Pretty much it's like 37signals Lite ... all the design skills, but smaller projects/redesigns.

Now regarding Kinja, I really like the idea of getting "non-bloggers" involved in the blogging community. My mom reads some of weblogs that I read, and even though she doesn't understand a lot of the technical jargon used, she still feels that sense of accomplishment when she mentions a post on Kottke randomly and I know what she's talking about :)

I think the service is fantastic for people like her. I can populate (which she can add/edit later on) her weblog list with blogs that I read along with ones that she'd find interesting, and she can read through them without having to remember any URLs.

01 Apr 2004 | Mike said...

If Hugh gets to remove "Gay", then can I please remove "Conservative"? :)

01 Apr 2004 | Hugh said...

Mike, that would exclude Andrew Sullivan.

01 Apr 2004 | Jonny Roader said...

"Mike, that would exclude Andrew Sullivan."

No great hardship.

01 Apr 2004 | pb said...

I think 37express is a pretty good service both for 37 and for its customers. A lot of sites could benefit from sending their core pages over to 37 for review even if they don't implement any of the results. And $2500 is a lot easier to get approval for.

And, of course 37express can be used for unlaunched sites.

01 Apr 2004 | Aaron said...

Did you know? When using darker background colors for emphasis (ie. "Did you know" or hover-on-links), it looks nicer if you add padding, and you make that padding consistent (ie. "Did you know?" looks cheap going right up to the edge. What else gets that close to a background edge? Oh, that's right, the left hand side of hovered-links, where the text fantastically melds into the background of the page)

Other things of note: No label tags. Why does it strip out image tags from posts? What is "Showcase"? How is "Conservative" different from "Politics" (or perhaps, why is it different?)

It would be nice to mention in the "You don't have any favorites" that you can browse through the editors' digests, and add stuff from there. Can I not save time, not scan the entries, and read the entire post with images in it? For some places (like Gothamist and Gizmodo, that I visit regularly), the pictures are half the fun. And can it please suggest other weblogs I might be interested in reading based on a representation of people who have the same blogs as I do in their list? Can there be a thing to mark it read/unread? Something as simple as a "I've read all friends page posts up to this point" box.

01 Apr 2004 | Nick Denton said...

No time now to respond to all these points individually, but this is a really useful discussion, and we're all following it closely. After a few days, we'll gather together all the suggestions for improvements, and we'll start with this thread. Thanks!

01 Apr 2004 | megnut said...

"I thought 37express was intended for redesigns, not new product development."

Well we had the whole thing designed initially and then wanted some feedback and assistance in getting stuff just right. So in some ways, it was a redesign, just for a new product that hadn't launched yet, if that makes sense! :)

Aaron, great suggestions and just the type of stuff that's on the list for upcoming features. As for stripping out image tags: we don't have a system in place to locally store and resize images, and we certainly didn't want to load images of other people's servers, especially on a high-traffic topic digest. Images do add a whole flavor to a post though (and with photoblogs, it is the post) and it's something we'd like to tackle. Just not yet. It's only beta, after all!

01 Apr 2004 | ek said...

So how long before Google assimilates you? ;-)

To Mike's point, I agree that Kinja is a great idea as sort of an RSS feed reader for the rest of us (man, if you mom quotes Kottke she must be cool! ;-). I know that no one else in my family would ever go through the trouble of downloading and installing an RSS reader, but would go to a site to read Blog posts around a specific subject (to them it would just be another Web-based information resource).

FYI, a small link bug — the link to the privacy policy from the "Create Account: Step 1 of 3" page appears to be broken (it's the one in the small text below the "Retype email address" field). It points to http://www.kinja.com/privacy.knj, and I get a "Not Found" error on that page (maybe it would be a good thing to get 37s to give the site a contingency design going over?).

But that's a tiny issue, keep up the great work y'alls!

02 Apr 2004 | Hugh said...

Sometimes I visit weblogs even though I've read all the posts (meg - photoblogs above). Consider adding the list of favorites to the right column below the bookmarklets section.

02 Apr 2004 | ek said...

Couple of additional thoughts after using it for a little while...

+ Seems like it would have been better if Kinja just drew on an existing favicon instead of creating a new 32x32 pixel icon. The thought of manually creating and storing 32x32 pixel icons for every Blog publisher who'd like you to do so is not such a pretty one. Plus, the smaller favicon next to the post title (instead of aligned left to the excerpt) would, I think, still get the visual idea across, without looking as cluttered. Finally, how about some sort of prettier default "no image available" image instead of the now existing blank white box?

+ The red minus sign (-) next to the Blog URL looks a lot like the bar-graph-like relevance indicators you see on some search engines' results pages. How about something more along the lines of the 'X' icon used in Outlook Express and Hotmail (apps that lots of newbie-types are familiar with) or the circle with a line through it ala Apple's Mail.app?

+ Finally, any possibility that you could add an indication of the number of comments have been made to each displayed post? That, to me, is a very useful indicator of relevance/'view-worthiness'. And, actually, I would almost rather view just the headlines and number of comments for the Blogs in my favorites list — once you've read a post all you're really concerned with is if there are new comments.

Just some random thoughts.

02 Apr 2004 | Sanat Gersappa said...

Cool site. You guys do everything so right!

02 Apr 2004 | mark said...

Step three of three of the sign up process confused me a bit. Should I add adresses with or without http:'s? With or without www's? Does it want the feed's adress or the blog address?

***

Nice, it does work both ways, with the blog's addresses. However, it spits out code under Safari. Looks like this:

The web sites: -br /-*http://slashdot.org-br /-*http://metafilter.com-br /-*http://isopixel.net-br /- have been added to your favorites.

Damn, replace hyphens for tags.

02 Apr 2004 | mark said...

Damn again. It didn't spit out code the second time when I corrected some URL's.

But I noticed it doesn't support foreign caracters, I'm seeing question marks where accents are supposed to be in Spanish.

02 Apr 2004 | gunit said...

*cough* support unicode already *cough*