

Ask HN: Review my site, nice-entity.com - shawn_allison

http://www.nice-entity.com<p>Longtime reader, first time submitter.<p>I've just launched Nice Entity. Basically, it's a resource for web designers and developers to quickly and easily look up character references.<p>Yes, there are already a lot of sites out there that do this, but they either:<p>A) look awful, 
B) are poorly organized, 
C) not as complete as I hope my site is.<p>Any feedback and/or critique would be most welcome.<p>Thanks in advance!
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ugh
I would change the hover color. This will not really be a problem for many
users, but with the default OS X selection color – combined with your hover
color – entity selections are very hard to see. Since many will want to copy
the entities from your site this could be problematic. You could change the
hover color to grey or something like that. (This is less a problem with your
site and more one with OS X behavior: selection colors shouldn’t be hard to
see, no matter the background.)

One more thing: It really breaks my heart that this site – of all sites – uses
wrong quotation marks. It’s “Find your character!”, not "Find your character!"
(Whether or not it is appropriate to use quotation marks for claims like this
is certainly also debatable.)

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shawn_allison
Thanks very much for bringing this issue of the OS X selection colour to my
attention! Based on your feedback I am going to change the table hover colour
to be a shade of grey.

I also feel mortified that, of all things, I did not wrap the site's tagline
in proper quotation marks. This will be remedied!

Thanks again for your feedback.

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mbrubeck
It looks great! A search box seems like an obvious useful feature (even though
the dataset is small enough to browse through for the most part).

Edited to add: Shouldn't &quot; and &apos; appear somewhere? Yes, real
quotation marks should be preferred in typography, but straight quotes are
extremely common and sometimes appropriate (e.g. in source code) and it's
necessary to escape them inside of HTML/XML attributes. And yes, I know &apos;
has compatibility problems that should be made clear somehow...

~~~
shawn_allison
Thanks for your feedback!

In regards to the issue of &apos; I didn't include it based on compatibility
issues and this article's opinion
<http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2003/07/01/the_curse_of_apos/>

I did totally forget to include &quot; and it will be added in an update later
today.

A search box may be something I will implement in the future, but for now I do
feel the dataset is small enough that people should be able to find what they
need quickly enough. The suggestion is noted though.

Thanks.

~~~
mbrubeck
Why not list apostrophe as &#39; and include a link to that article? If you
omit it, users will just look it up somewhere else and maybe get it wrong.

~~~
shawn_allison
I've updated the site and done as you suggested. Thanks for the advise!

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c_allison
Very nice. Points for cleanliness. I'm running Chromium on Win7 RC1 (SRWare
Iron specifically) and I'm getting blocks for the quotes in the sub title
“Find your character!”

Also couldn't ignore your last name, Allisons win :D

~~~
shawn_allison
Thanks letting me know!

I've decided to take the quote marks off the tagline to just make life easier.
Regardless of browser, there should be no issues now with text rendering in
any of the main parts of the site template. (Fingers crossed)

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tdoggette
Dashed URLs are internet ghettos.

