Ask HN: Review my holiday project
I realized yesterday that I wanted this for myself, so I decided to spend a little bit of extra effort to make it usable by anybody:
http://resolution-tracker.appspot.com/
http://resolution-tracker.appspot.com/
It's really nice to see useful little projects like this take shape so quickly, do you have a way to track the user if they should wipe their machine / switch browser ?
As it's built on appengine, it wouldn't be too hard to tie everything to a google account. I actually wrote about half of that, but it got dropped because I decided I preferred a more polished, less featureful project.
I hope it will take off, it's a really nice example of how it's done. I'll try to live up to your standards the next time I release something.
Your tracker is the first thing that has ever worked for me. Even after just 8 days, I can tell that this is different from every other new years. I can do bits and pieces of my daily goal whenever I find time, and your app keeps count. I can keep my goal in mind without having to remember the numbers or play head games. There is nothing complicated, no 'options' to vacillate over, no pretty pictures or quotes to distract me and no features to figure out. The calendar--like Seinfeld's 'Don't break the chain' is a tremendous visual motivator.
I'd be happy to pay ala shareware.
"You can't. (This is to prevent people from using this method as a way of submitting a link, but with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.)"
Traceback (most recent call last): File "/base/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 509, in __call__ handler.post(groups) File "/base/data/home/apps/resolution-tracker/1.338888254051474539/resolution.py", line 69, in post r.threshold = int(self.request.get('threshold', 1)) ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: ''
Also, make error messages pretty, please:
As you're seeing, as soon as you make it usable by anybody, people start complaining about form validation and usability issues. You should decide now how much effort you want to put in.
For the most part, this was an exercise in taking a project to completion, which I've always had trouble doing. I think that I succeeded in that, and I'm not particularly interested in turning it into yet another ongoing, never-finished project.
Consider open sourcing it on github, and if anyone asks for anything just reply with "patches welcome" You'll probably never get anything from it, but who knows?
> You need to check in -2 more times this week to meet your goal.
Good luck.
1) Laying out the calendar (programmatically generated)
2) Having an element with a working 'vertical-align' CSS property
3) The layout of the form on the initial page.
Everything else is done with CSS. Except for 3, which was because I was running out of time, I don't see how getting rid of the <table> tags helps things. I hope you don't want me to encode the positions of all the calendar dates in the CSS file.
If not, move on to something more important.
HTML tables vs. CSS is one of those decisions that really doesn't matter. No product has ever failed because they used HTML tables, so why worry about it? Use whichever helps you get the job done faster.