I also started my personal blog today at http://mdoliwa.com with 30 days blogging challange :).

I have an old site that's been making good money of amazon affiliate (for 5-7 years now). I re-applied with that same site, with another, new, affiliate account, and it got rejected. So their whole approval procedure seems quite arbitrary.

  /* native device fonts */
  body { font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji"; }
  
  a { text-decoration: none; color: #444; }
  a:hover { color: lime !important; }
  
  p.item > a { font-size: 17px; color: #00C; }
  p.item-info { color: #666; }

LaptopHits.com is the first one. Idea came to me when two of my friends wanted to buy new laptops and asked me,'the computer guy', for some recommendations. I'm not laptop expert, so I usually ask for price range, display size, brand preferences and check some popular forums for laptop recommendations. To save some time doing this I wrote LaptopHits.com. It should collect all laptop mentions from all online discussions, but for now, as it's just MVP version, online discussion == Reddit comments and laptop mentions == Amazon links.

What do you think about it ?

Very clever on Amazon links in reddit being the source of truth. That will obviously leave a lot on the table, but gives you really reliable parsing.

Honestly, this is a great site. I'd keep it simple, but you could definitely expand on the styling a little bit.

Great work!

Op, if you'd like some help with that, shoot me a mail (in profile).

The site is already divided into three sections: header, controls to the left, laptop list to the right. To style that accordingly won't make it in any way less useable or readable. Making the header look like a header would not affect you negatively in any way, or properly styling the pagination, or giving it a color scheme (even one based on white as background).

Really, this is a Show HN. Let's at least try to give OP proper feedback without resorting to head-in-the-sand subjectivity like that. "I'd prefer to have it look like my site I created for geocities with Frontpage" is not what will help OP presenting this to a potential employer, or making it a viable source of income.

To be fair, I can't. I'm basing it on how I see your suggestions in my head. But the way I interpret the changes are how I've seen other sites do it, and it just sounds worse to me. I don't like extra styling, as it ends up cluttering the display. I personally find color-schemes annoying. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd have to see how OP implements your suggestions before actually deciding.

> Really, this is a Show HN. Let's at least try to give OP proper feedback without resorting to head-in-the-sand subjectivity like that. "I'd prefer to have it look like my site I created for geocities with Frontpage" is not what will help OP presenting this to a potential employer, or making it a viable source of income.

I think you really need to take a breath here. I am giving OP proper feedback, which just happens to disagree with yours. Neither style is "right". They are both subjective preferences. I'm saying that I like the style he chose, and disagree with the "improvements" that you are suggesting. I fail to see how I'm sticking my head in the sand.

I would argue that keeping it simple is helping him. It makes the site more usable, less cluttered, faster to load, less maintenance and more easily navigable.

Maybe. You see, I hesitated after writing this, but then decided to stick with it. Just because I really am convinced that it is really bad advice. Based on my own sites (and pc-kombo.de is even in a related field), if you don't get the design at least near of being okay, people won't accept your site. Based on my studies, I know that usability does not get worse when giving it a proper design. And readability can simply (well, sometimes it's not that simple) be measured, but there is no reason at all it would get worse by doing the basics.

There is a small subset of people (socialized with another internet?) who really think the design of a site does not matter for them, or who disapprove of everything they think is modern design. Based on your comments, you are in that category. And some others commented in the same spirit here. Listening to those means making a site which 99% of internet users won't accept. At least as long as your site is not craigslist – but even current craigslist has more design than what I see on OPs site.

Not having a design is perfectly fine for a MVP. But not fine when going further. Stating otherwise actively hurts his chances of succeeding.

Now I feel like we're not even speaking the same language. Some of the current trends in webdev are no advanced options, no configuration settings, preventing urls from setting state, etc. I think most of these have great intentions, but they do reduce functionality.

I'm just saying that, in general, I don't like the colors, extra elements, logos, etc. That's all clutter IMO that doesn't make sites less functional, but adds unnecessary cruft to them. I think this site is fine as is and doesn't need that extra stuff. If you think it does, then great! I'm glad you suggested it. I just disagree with you.

  a { text-decoration: none, color: [something else] }

It could do with some responsive styling.

In Firefox, the results section is too wide, resulting in text that is either too small to read or that requires left-right scrolling. However, the filter section smart-zooms nicely and is easy to click.

In Chrome, the results section is wrapped and of legible size and is easy to skim through by scrolling vertically. However, there is a vertical strip of missing pixels at the left, such that the number 10 on the last result is missing its numeral 1 and part of its 0. The filter section smart-zooms nicely and is easy to click.

In both, it would be nice to lose the underscoring on the links (a pet peeve of mine, fixed with a user style sheet on my laptop).

Maybe he's not trying to cater to a mobile context, I don't know his intentions. I am just expressing my opinion that I think the site is great and doesn't need any more styling. It works fine on my phone, yet somehow that means I'm trolling? Not sure what more you want me to say?

And yes, you are certainly open to your opinions - I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree : )

By normal I mean the general public. And yes I know about craigslist, but that one has decades (?) of background.

I wanted to ship it fast, so these are the reasons. Affiliate program is a nice addition to it, but even without it I'd still collect laptop mentions this way, as it's the simplest way for me to implement such a tool.

>More mentions does not equal better.

I totally agree with it, it's only one step in laptop research, but if you don't have time or knowledge to do some more research I think it's quiete safe guess.

Nailed it.

In fact when I need a new laptop, I'll use Google to search Reddit and change the filter settings to show only recent reviews i.e.

```windows laptop site:reddit.com/r/suggestalaptop```

I'm very interested in doing something like this for an app idea. Can you (or OP or someone else) tell me what the "path of least friction" is, to parse sub-reddits programatically? Is it using their API? Are there PaaS (Parsers as service) available? After that, what would I do? Apply some sort of NLP or AI?

There are a few big reasons for this:

- Since it's computer shopping, you'll probably have a fair amount of users accessing this site from a mobile device.

- Mobile users are more likely to leave your site if it looks even a little frustrating to use. Google offers several mobile friendly sites that recommend laptops.

- Google will not rank your site as high if it does not deem it to be mobile friendly.

- You said you are looking for a job as a Rails developer. It's a fair bet that any potential employer will expect mobile-compatible sites. Perhaps you don't really intend to do much front end work, but knowing more about it will benefit you regardless.

I understand that what your site offers is very special, and probably much better than hand picked recommendations. Many mobile users simply don't care. They don't want to zoom and pan to select options. Why should they stick around on your site, when they can just hit "back" and choose another result from google?

All that said, I really like what your site has going on. It seems quite functional, and the minimal design is a breath of fresh air.

There are two other things I would change, but these are just personal preference. Feel free to ignore them:

1. I would like the option to view more items per page.

2. The default, bright blue link color hurts my eyes. Something a little darker would be great.

Keep up the good work!

OP, congrats on shipping. I'd recommend reading a bit about UX and throwing a CSS framework around your work to make it more palatable to general public. :)

Maybe add some HN mentions as well ;)

Are you using Amazon affiliate links? I'd hate for you to miss out on potential revenue, as you're offering a decent service.

How did that work out? Like seriously (not trolling). Did you make a lot of money? Always wondered about dabbling in Gambling / online games / casinos.

Why do you want back in on software development?

I want to go back to software development because I want regular pay with no variance :), and as I have a lot of ideas for side projects like this I'd love to work with advanced coders to learn more about web development, good practices, tips and tricks :).

Why play Poker when you can write some AI to do it for you? ;)

No, that is against online sites terms, but I do wonder how often it happens. It's certainly not the kind of thing the sites would want to own up to.

[edit: personally I love the fact there's 0 images of the laptops, etc. Just data...]

[edit 2: regarding mobile friendly, I had no problem browsing this on mobile. If you do so, try to do it with CSS only and layout, IMO]