score your representative!
Mood: good
Posted on 2007-04-23 09:39:00
Tags: movies homepage congressvotes
Words: 61

So over the weekend I finished congressvotes - check it out! (I also prettied up my homepage a little bit...maybe I'll actually make it look nice some day)

We did see Hot Fuzz this weekend, and it was awesome. Like Shaun of the Dead it's a good mix between a comedy and a serious movie (cop drama/mystery in this case). Highly recommended!

8 comments

Comment from onefishclappin:
2007-04-23T10:02:45+00:00
More colors != prettier :)

Comment from gregstoll:
2007-04-23T10:59:07+00:00
I'm open to suggestions!

Comment from onefishclappin:
2007-04-23T11:20:00+00:00
I'll be brutal - take or leave, no need to justify to me.
1) Too much text to read through to get the information. Bold titles with smaller text for the description would be more readable.
LiveJournal Backup - JavaScriptRuby program to fully back up your livejournal entries, including comments. See the example of my public journal.
-Released 14-Jan-2007

2) Don't serialize the sections. I get the feeling that you want a single main page with all the data, but there's too much information to have all on one page. Pick you top 5 items you want, or you think other people want on the front page, and then link everything else from section pages ("Projects", "Personal", "Fun", etc).

3) I like the fact that it's low bandwidth. You don't clutter it with random crud.

4) The color language box text is too small to be easily readable. The key gets lost at the top (since it's hard to distinguish from another entry). I would use softer colors. This would let them not jump out so much, but still serve the purpose.

5) What's the most important part of each entry? That should be what you see when you look at the line. Right now, the language tag box jumps out, but isn't unique to that entry so ends up feeling odd. Maybe highlight the title, main idea, with the language color if you think the language is very important.

6) I'm picky and a perfectionist. It's a lot easier to critique someone else's page than bother doing a decent one of your own. Ignore at will. :)

Comment from gregstoll:
2007-04-23T11:52:37+00:00
No, this is great! I'm "between projects" right now anyway, so I'm (sorta) looking for something to do, and I know it doesn't look great, but it's a long way from that to realizing what would make it better. Thanks a lot!

Comment from onefishclappin:
2007-04-23T12:16:03+00:00
I'm always happy to nitpick. Let me know if you want more ideas/suggestion or to look at a beta version. I actually (oddly enough) kinda enjoy making UIs readable and useful.

Comment from wildrice13:
2007-04-23T13:26:01+00:00
Me too. That's why I've spent so much time setting up my WoW UI. It might seem ridiculous to spend so much time on a non-game part of a game, but I get a sense of accomplishment from having it as functional as possible while still as streamlined and unobtrusive as possible (the game landscape is the most important thing while playing after all, not a bunch of numbers and meters and text boxes).

Comment from gerdemb:
2007-04-23T15:11:46+00:00
Interesting web page. I wish there was more data to compare the votes to. I guess you don't have the same data set for senators too?

Comment from gregstoll:
2007-04-23T15:17:19+00:00
Unfortunately, the data on roll-call votes for senators is not in some nice XML format - I'd basically have to do a bunch of screen-scraping. Which I might do at some point...

This backup was done by LJBackup.