Ask HN: Wrote a Blog Post, Comments? Critiques? Constructive Criticism?

Ask HN: Wrote a Blog Post, Comments? Critiques? Constructive Criticism?(blog.adamallidina.com)

5 points by addies 14 years ago | 11 comments

aw3c2 14 years ago |

- The font looks terrible on my screen. No subpixel hinting or what that fancy stuff is again. I see colours around the characters I think.

- The font is big and bold and the lines are long. Hard to read.

- The date is in that lunatic format where the date is not clear. Use DMY ordering or write out the month.

- Waterloo?

- The site could use some layout. I actually thought you were abusing Javascript for that because it looked so plain and so I enabled it to check (with no changes).

- The text has a lot of words, no visible structure and a lot of mentions of AWS which to me is not related to the headline. I gave it one quick scanning but could not really figure out what you are on about (the code parts are trivial) so I lost interest.

- Are you just trying to get referrers to Amazon? If so, make sure the links are actually visible.

addies 14 years ago | |

Hey, thanks a ton for your feedback. I really appreciate it. To address your comments:

1. I'm actually concerned about this, it doesn't look obscenely bad on any of my test setups (OS X, Windows 7 and Arch). Could you elaborate on what you viewed the post on (Browser, OS, etc.?)

2. I'm open to more suggestions on fonts :)

3. :(

4. Waterloo, Ontario - Where I happen to be writing the post

5. I'm not much of a designer but I'm working on it. The site is just statically generated HTML and CSS (yay Jekyll)

6. The post really isn't intended for the tech savvy readers of Hacker News, it's really just an instructional guide on how to setup AWS to tunnel your browser traffic for you.

7. No referral links :)

Thanks again for your feedback, it's a great metric for me.

true_religion 14 years ago | |

Just want to point out....

The font looks bad because there is only one font in the cascade: Gentium Book Basic. I'm not sure how many people have that installed, but since the number is hard to reach for I assume its very few.

If you don't have Gentium Book Basic installed then you use the system serif (e.g. MS Serif which sucks).

addies 14 years ago |

Hey HN, I just finished writing my first real blog post and I was hoping to get some feedback. I would really apprecatie it if you guys could quickly skim through it and give me any comments you have on it. The post itself is just a simple guide on SSH tunnelling through an EC2 machine.

Thanks!

nintax 14 years ago | |

looks great.

alexitosrv 14 years ago |

What you've wrote is great! Add another post for the prerequisite of the AWS instance and link it there too.

Later, include more content on what you want to become an expert and surely the end result will be nothing more than satisfactory! Go ahead.

DanielRibeiro 14 years ago |

You may also wish to add -C2qTnN[1]. At least -C2 for compression.

[1] https://calomel.org/firefox_ssh_proxy.html

addies 14 years ago | |

Thanks! Great tip.

swang 14 years ago |

It is DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Not DCMA

addies 14 years ago | |

Ooops. Thanks for that.

sliverstorm 14 years ago |

The page claims to be a "guide". It reads like an article. That is to say, walloftext. If you aim to teach people how to do something with their computer, it is generally good to cut down on the text and include some helpful pictures, information on alternatives, and briefly address common problems.

It isn't a bad post, but I don't know that I'd call it a guide.