Relpost Launched

March 10, 2010

It has been over an year now when I first thought of Relpost—a place where related quality articles and blog posts can be found. There are many good articles and blog posts that get buried as archives. Relpost intends to fetch those valuable articles (lost in the archives) and put them together where they could be easily found.

Why Relpost?

Huge number of articles are written every day on various subject but its hard to read all of them at once and hard to find quality content. When we google for content and articles, most of the times the results are based on keywords than on actual content. It’s hard to know about the quality of the article without reading it. At Relpost, we make sure that only quality posts are included.

Who gets the pass?

As to maintain the quality of content at Relpost, I add 1-2 related posts a week. After deciding the topic, I collect 10-15 posts and skim each article. Shortlisting 5-7 articles from those, I choose and categorize final 5 posts based on the value of content.

Content precedes Design

At Relpost, Content precedes Design. Being a content-oriented site, I’ve tried to focus more on clarity and simplicity of design for Relpost. The Relpost logo and headings use Calluna while rest of the text is set in Museo Sans via Typekit.

Relpost went through couple of design revisions before this finalized design. I was looking for something simple, clean and more focused on content where the related posts are easy to scan. The source for a particular article is provided on extreme right. Each post is accompanied by popular sharing mediums like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Digg.

My wife—Harjot Grewal—customized WordPress as to help me build this dream resource website.

Suggestions

Feedback and suggestions are accepted via Get Satisfaction. Feel free to suggest related posts and features you want to see at Relpost. I hope Relpost will help all my designer friends out there while serving them with fresh content from the hottest web designers and the coolest blogs.

Share the posts you like and give rating to each post you find valuable. Follow Relpost on Twitter and feel free to comment what you feel about Relpost.

3 Comments

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  • # praveen
    says on March 11

    Nice one!
    Clean, usable, informative.


  • # Charles Roper
    says on March 28

    A great idea. It’s almost impossible to track all of the high quiality posts and articles out there on various topics, so it’s nice to have someone do it for us. 🙂

    And a great looking site… unless you’re on Windows. Unfortunately, Museo Sans isn’t well hinted and therefore renders badly with ClearType at medium to small sizes; it renders terribly with ClearType off and renders barely acceptably with IE9 DirectWrite. Looking at the design on Windows makes me suspect you designed it on a Mac? It looks lovely on a Mac and on Safari Windows (which uses the same text rendering engine as OS X).

    Here’s a screenshot comparing Safari, Firefox (standard ClearType) and IE9 (DirectWrite).

    http://i.imgur.com/l1Zb7.png

    As you should be able to see, Safari looks best to us designers, but it’s renowned for rendering text fuzzily or heavily. The Firefox example doesn’t look great any way you look at it. Large type is clearly showing a lack of Y-axis anti-aliasing, and Museo has clumsy hinting. IE9’s DirectWrite text looks lovely at larger sizes – more delicate that Safari’s effort, but it still hints heavily at medium to small sizes and, as we’ve established, Museo is not well hinted and so it doesn’t look good.

    There are several reasons Microsoft don’t take the Apple strategy, with one being that research has found well hinted text is more readable than unhinted text, given you have a font with good hinting built-in. Another reason is that people who are used to the ‘sharp’ nature of ClearType find OS X rendering ‘fuzzy’. I remember when my organisation turned on ClearType for the first time; they had so many complaints about fuzziness, they had to turn it back off again, much to my frustration. One person moaned, “I felt like I had something wrong with my glasses.”

    I personally mostly prefer OS X and Safari rendering, but I’m a designer and I’m not working for my own pleasure. The way different systems render text is a constraint and I have to design around it. That means testing on Windows and making font choices accordingly.

    But don’t take my word for it, he’s a great article on the subject that interviews some real experts:

    http://readableweb.com/font-hinting-explained-by-a-font-design-master/

    This topic of hinting might make a great RelPost, eh? Here’s another related article:

    http://24ways.org/2009/real-fonts-and-rendering (the comments contain lots of good stuff – make sure you check those)


  • # Amrinder
    says on March 31

    @Charles: Thanks for the feedback and valuable links.

    Typefaces changed from Calluna to Hoefler Text and Museo Sans to Tahoma.