What I found is that I keep having "feature fever", where I think of all these ways of doing stuff that might or might not have value to the user.
The site database is actually set up for voting -- you can vote up and down books and create your own rankings according to your opinion. But it was another feature I had to kill. I find the hardest thing about building a site is killing stuff. It took me forever to strip out as much as I could from hn-books. Right now I'm a bit shy of starting to put stuff back in. Over and over again it looks like whatever I add -- reviews for tools, a link to get your own Kindle, a new question category, live real-time commenting with social links -- all seems to meet with some resistance from the community. I'm never sure if I'm hurting the community or just making artistic decisions that some small percentage of people don't like.
I really like hackerbooks with the simple categories and multiple books above the fold. One of the emails I got recently was from a guy who set up a "bookshelf" with books on it -- an image of a real bookshelf with what looked like real hacker books sitting on it. That was pretty cool too.
When I set the site up, I consulted with a few HNers about this very issue -- how to sort/filter. Like you, I'm still not happy with where it is right now.
So I'm open-minded, I'm just keeping the bar a bit high for any changes right now. One of the most difficult things I am learning is to separate what might be cool from what might be best. Still working on it. If you guys keep asking for tag clouds, happy to put them in.
EDIT: Bit of trivia, if you hold down "ctrl" and click on questions in hn-books you can apply multiple filters. So say you only had time to read 1 book, but wanted to know as much as you could about "how do I make beautiful web pages" and "How do I tell people about my business". You just ctrl-click on both, then get a list of books that covers both questions: http://hn-books.com/#BC=0&EC=0&FC=0&Q0=1&Q1=... Not sure tags would work that way by default (Also this is probably a great example of something I spent time putting in that means absolutely nothing to anybody)
Daniel, The ctrl-click feature is really cool.
I hear you about feature creep. I am struggling with similar issues with what I am working on.
I keep reminding myself Every piece of software I paid for recently is dead simple to use
What I found is that I keep having "feature fever", where I think of all these ways of doing stuff that might or might not have value to the user.
The site database is actually set up for voting -- you can vote up and down books and create your own rankings according to your opinion. But it was another feature I had to kill. I find the hardest thing about building a site is killing stuff. It took me forever to strip out as much as I could from hn-books. Right now I'm a bit shy of starting to put stuff back in. Over and over again it looks like whatever I add -- reviews for tools, a link to get your own Kindle, a new question category, live real-time commenting with social links -- all seems to meet with some resistance from the community. I'm never sure if I'm hurting the community or just making artistic decisions that some small percentage of people don't like.
I really like hackerbooks with the simple categories and multiple books above the fold. One of the emails I got recently was from a guy who set up a "bookshelf" with books on it -- an image of a real bookshelf with what looked like real hacker books sitting on it. That was pretty cool too.
When I set the site up, I consulted with a few HNers about this very issue -- how to sort/filter. Like you, I'm still not happy with where it is right now.
So I'm open-minded, I'm just keeping the bar a bit high for any changes right now. One of the most difficult things I am learning is to separate what might be cool from what might be best. Still working on it. If you guys keep asking for tag clouds, happy to put them in.
EDIT: Bit of trivia, if you hold down "ctrl" and click on questions in hn-books you can apply multiple filters. So say you only had time to read 1 book, but wanted to know as much as you could about "how do I make beautiful web pages" and "How do I tell people about my business". You just ctrl-click on both, then get a list of books that covers both questions: http://hn-books.com/#BC=0&EC=0&FC=0&Q0=1&Q1=... Not sure tags would work that way by default (Also this is probably a great example of something I spent time putting in that means absolutely nothing to anybody)