Nice look, though my first thought was, "Oh, it's just News.YC with a sweet logo." Has some cool features that News.YC doesn't, but also seems a bit too complicated. Do you intend to compete with News.YC, or try to gather a different user base, or none of the above?

Well, I'd like to gather a similar user base to sites like GoBigNetwork (.com) and Vator.tv, while encouraging the great discussions had at places like news.yc and Reddit.

Just a place to showcase your companies, write about any of your experiences and have thoughtful discussions.

Which features do you think are somewhat complicated? I know I started off with a lot of features (which may not have been too wise), but I tried to keep it as simple as possible.

That said, I am very, very open to suggestions and will mold the site around the community, not the other way around.

I guess it just seemed like quite a lot was going on right on the home page -- too much for me to get my head around all at once. It's possible you're trying to achieve too much: discussions/comments like News.YC, longer articles, featured member pages, job openings, generic wiki, etc. Perhaps not; maybe just simplifying the home page a bit would help my perception.

I started this off 1.5 months ago as a project to work on while I learn Ruby on Rails. I think it turned out decently, so I've decided to share it with the world.

Use the invite code "yconvicts" to register. :) Please let me know what you think, I would love some feedback!!

Also be sure to check your spam filters to see if the activation email got caught, I'm still working on that issue (pointers would be appreciated!). Thanks! =)

Do you have spf records for your domain set up optimally? It looks like you have 'v=spf1 mx ~all'. You could switch the ~all to -all and turn the soft fail into a hard fail.

Thanks, I've changed the SPF records like you suggested. I'm using my other server as the mail server since I was having some weird issues with the one at DevGrow.

Whenever I would send an email from the DevGrow mail server, it would go straight to spam in Hotmail/MSN. In Gmail, it would go to the inbox unless the body of the email had my domain name in it, which essentially meant all useful emails would go to the spam filter.

I haven't figured out why that is happening or how to fix it, so I've temporarily resorted to using my other mail server. I'm using SoftLayer for hosting if you're curious, but their support seems to be taking a vacation (maybe just from my question?).

Nice first RoR app. =) Mine was much less slick.

Also ensure you've got reverse DNS set up correctly for your domain.

From the initial login message you sent me, it looks like you signed on to the mail server using www.devgrow.com, but your reverse dns is just devgrow.com. You might want to make it so they match exactly. Also, have you run it through the latest spamassassin filters? Those aren't always too useful, but sometimes they catch things you may have missed. Finally, have you tried it without the exclamation marks? You currently have one in the subject and two in the message.

While making a cursory clickthrough to your site, the first thing I noticed was that higher-than-default font sizes flows outside the divs and disappear. I have seen this on several sites (even some large ones), but that doesn't change the fact that it's a bit bothersome. I just wanted to let you know in case you weren't aware of the issue.

Just curious, how do you plan on sustaining it?

I realize not everything has to be a business. It would be great if people just provided us with things for free out of their own charity, but not everyone can do that forever...

I'm hoping to get support the site with advertising and sponsors, preferably from startups and from VCs. It's not a YouTube-like site where I'm expecting multi-million pageviews a day, but I think building a small yet strong community of entrepreneurs and VCs may be an attractive place for either of these groups to advertise in.

Edit: I'm not trying to break anyones bank or wallet here, if the community can be built up, I would just like to keep it self-sustaining, meaning paying for the dedicated server. Like I said, this was just an experiment - I am working on another project I hope to release as my primary source of income.

The trouble with getting VCs to advertise is that their preferred way to generate deal flow is through trusted relationships. It would be difficult to do this purely through advertising (and it costs them less to just use word of mouth, not that they are tight on the money these days...).

Getting startups to advertise isn't very logical either because most of the time the target audience isn't the so-called TechCrunch 50K (unless they are advertising a job opening, but again, this is more often that not fulfilled through word of mouth and personal recommendations).

This is an unfortunate reality of the way the world works (although arguably word of mouth is a lot more effective in some cases).

Honestly, I think you're best chance at monetization is advertising for companies that provide the proverbial "picks and shovels" to startups--cut a deal with a hosting company, a domain registrar, The Company Corporation (to register as an LLC or C/S-Corp). Perhaps you'd have better luck getting some lawyers that deal with this stuff to advertise on there. (Think about this: you know who all the big VCs are, but do you know any good lawyers?) There are few other types of services that fall into this category. It would be neat to let people rate their experiences with different service providers.

Cork'd was definitely a lot of inspiration, but how did I steal his design? The color scheme is straight from http://kuler.adobe.com/ (under popular) and while I totally stole his idea of the character in the welcome box and search bar placement, the layout is different in all other respects. I took ideas from lots of places, including the Expression Engine site - and the logo is simply a modification of a free Illustrator icon from Komodo Design. :)

Anyways, I did send him an email to show him the site and make sure he's personally OK with it, but haven't heard back yet. It was more of a courtesy than anything else for using the similar character + welcome box combo.

Your design -- original (though still same family of shades, etc.) colorscheme or not -- is just too similar. It's obvious you started with his design and built on top of it. Same width, same logo position, same search box, same zebra-striped tables, etc. And those similarities are exacerbated by the use of the illustration and the checkmark icons.

While I'm guessing Dan would most likely be OK with the design, if you think of it this way than I'm guessing lots of others will too. I'm changing a lot of the front page layouts around - I definitely don't want that impression to be the popular one.

Thanks for your input, I very much appreciate it. Check back a little later and let me know what you think. I'm keeping the color choice though, that was the first thing I picked when I decided to make the site.

Looks different enough to me, at least at the current time.

Update on the design - Dan saw the previous version with the rounded version and character and was fine with it. Either way, I think I'm going to stick with the new design just to keep far away from any confusion.