Qatfish - Phase 1 (feedback)

[DrWilloughby]

I just finished up phase 1 of my new site, Qatfish (http://www.qatfish.com). Please help me break it!

Qatfish is a one-stop shop for blogs related to video game development.

Qatfish allows you to:
-Vote for your favorite posts.
-Find and read good blogs and avoid the boring or useless ones.

The site is a blog aggregator that isolates high quality blogs through user ratings, similar to the way that digg.com aggregates and promotes news stories. Click on the link above, you'll understand once you see it.

Phase 1 of Qatfish is to aggregate existing blogs through RSS feeds. Phase 2 (not complete yet) will be to allow anyone to start a blog on the Qatfish site itself, which will increase traffic for would-be bloggers and remove maintenance overhead.

If you know of a high-quality game development blog out there with an RSS feed, please let me know and I'll add it to the list. Also note that the profile pictures I put up for each of the bloggers came from their sites, aside from a few that didn't have appropriate logos. For those, the default radio tower is shown.

The categories on the left currently only display Qatfish blogs, meaning my own. Eventually they will start to fill up. Also, I have plans to allow syndicated blogs to be filtered into the appropriate categories.

[DrWilloughby]

Does the content not interest you? Is the site design just ugly? Were you put off but having to register to vote? Feel free to rip into it, I'd really like some feedback.

[papillon]

*shrug* Sorry, I come to the Announcements forum looking for new games, or occasionally new tools for making games. Not for blogs and certainly not for blogging tools. :) So I feel no motivation to click your link.

[GameStudioD]

I am not a big blog reader. Sometimes reading a blog article title is enough information. For me, the live bookmarks in FireFox suffice. Although, I am starting to pop by casualgameblogs.com every now and then. Voting, categorizing stuff, and who knows what else the site does seems to complicate matters.

With that said, the homepage seems very disorganized. If I hadn't read your post here, I would not have known the site deals with game development blogs. Also, with FireFox, the links open in a new window without a toolbar or scroll bars. If a page is taller than the window size, I cannot scroll. Most geek sites tend not to open links in new windows anyway...

[revve]

I don't generally read blogs, so I didn't pay much attention to your post after I realized it's not a game announcement or some such. When I did visit your page (after the second post) I was quite overwhelmed - the site is a bit disorganized and I really didn't know here to look or what to do. There's no clear indication of what the site is about or any real flow to the main page that I noticed. Even when I went to the page again to get a second opinion, I also just kinda glazed over.

A few specific things that bothered me (in addition to the above):

1.) The HUGE image ad at the top of the page. It looks waay too much like a header and really detracts from the site - it could also be very confusing for somebody just browsing by. If I look at the page as it's open in another tab, I'd say your site is called FriendCircles and it's about connecting a whole lotta people from across the world or some such.

2.) Put a space between the search and the text ad underneath it - it looks funny with it running into each other.

[DrWilloughby]

UPDATED (http://www.qatfish.com)

OK, I cleaned up the design, removed the top ad, added title headers to the sections, and made it so you don't have to register to give stars to posts.

If you're interested in reading blogs, I honestly believe it is a really cool resource. I've been using it myself and I feel like I can get a quick scan of the game development blogosphere really well here, expecially because it's very visual. Let me know what you think!

[Sharpfish]

Hi Andy,

I think it looks really good. Will add it to my regular visited sites now. :)

Good work

edit I noticed the "title" tags on mouse hover for the lower 7 of the top ten are using the info from the #3 spot. Not sure if you can/care to change that just now but just so you know. thnx

[DrWilloughby]

Awesome, thanks for the bug.

[revve]

Whoa! Small changes for big rewards. The site seems much more usable now and with the header image ad gone, it's a lot more streamlined (the ad it showed me really threw the whole page out of whack).

I can possibly suggest you add a page that just lists the blogs you aggregate (and possibly instructions on getting a new one added to the database). All in all, I feel this is much more user friendly than before.

Now, if you'll excuse me - there's a couple of blog entries I found that looks interesting....

[revve]

Just one more thing I though about:

You might think about opening article links in a frame, allowing you to rate the post while looking at the actual blog entry. It would be much more useful for the "open 10 links in new tabs and then go through them" type of surfer. If people must constantly go back and find the original link, they would be much less likely to vote for posts.

[DrWilloughby]

As for listing who I'm syndicating, yes I think I will replace the category listing on the left with a ladder for all the syndicated blogs ranked by highest average score. Right now, instructions and such are down in the footer, but maybe I should move the FAQ up onto the sidebar. If you have suggestions of blogs I've missed, please let me know.

As for the frame thing, I agree, that seems like it would be more user friendly, but I want to make sure I preserve the look and feel of the individual blogs. What about this solution:

Links do not open a new window, but they open the clicked on blog inside a frame where at the top there's a rating box and a link back to Qatfish?

[fortressgame@techhouseliv]

i have to admit i didn't read this whole thread, just responding to your post
need a way to subscribe to all posts, not by category only.

site isn't currently coming up, so i'm not sure its there.

[Jesse Aldridge]

I think it's a great idea. The site looks good to me. Bookmarked.

One question: Qatfish? :confused:

[DrWilloughby]

One question: Qatfish? :confused:
It's a bit silly. I got the phrase "It's raining cats and dogs" stuck in my head and it wouldn't go away. The tagline was going to be "It's raining Qats and Blogs" but I figured something a little more informative was better.

By the way, the full blogroll is added to the bottom of the sidebar.

[Sharpfish]

Andy - is there some missing CSS file or something? I just went to look and it's gone weird. All the content is down the bottom, it's lost all of the previous formating and layout. this is in case you didn't know, which I am sure you will shortly if you haven't fixed it already :)

[DrWilloughby]

I know, I screwed something up in the database, working on it now. ARG!

[DrWilloughby]

Fixed. Sorry about that.

/First time doing web development

[Chris Evans]

It definitely looks much better now! It is indeed funny how little minor changes can make huge gains. Anyway, I'll be bookmarking the site.

[revve]

Links do not open a new window, but they open the clicked on blog inside a frame where at the top there's a rating box and a link back to Qatfish?

This was exactly what I meant.

[Sharpfish]

I added a link to qatfish from my blog. (casual game blogs is already there). Not much but every little helps. :)

[DrWilloughby]

Thanks Sharpie! And revve, thanks for your feedback. I'll be implementing your frame idea on Monday. THere's also currently a bug where votes get registered more than once, so hopefully I can fix that as well.

[DrWilloughby]

Took a while, but we finally implemented the "Blog in a frame" thing so that the voting occurs in the window that is opened showing each blog. I hope it improves usability.

If anyone has any comments on the latest version of Qatfish, I'd love to hear them. The traffic is still pretty low, but it appears to be growing ever so slowly. There's been all sorts of good content on there lately.

http://www.Qatfish.com

[RohoMech]

The site looks cool, I'm definatly gonna visit pretty often.

I did have a comment about voting...I liked the star icon you're using...I wonder if you could make it clickable...like Digg.com where you click the Digg icon by the story to vote for it....

Also, you have a list of sites on your left side, below the animated advertisement....but then you have a ton of room off the right side of the page, any reason you couldn't just move the list of sites to the right side? I think it would expose them more...

Finally, at the very very very bottom you have your rss feed stuff and the FAQ etc...would it be possible to fit that stuff on the top of your page?

Anyways, looks great, I look forward to reading it :-)

[Sillysoft]

I have Qatfish in my list of 'reading' bookmarks, so count me a satisfied user of the service.

One problem: For some reason if I try to open a link in the top right in a new tab (using command-click with Safari/MacOS) it opens another window instead of the tab. Probably a javascript thang, and not that major.

Also, you should add a favicon, so it sticks out of my bookmark list better.