$65k/month website running on one index.php file | Hacker News Reader

$65k/month website running on one index.php file

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72 pointspatwalls21 comments

This reminds of the old saying "just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done".

Marketing > Tech

This

There's a ton of hard work on this website. The single index.php file is not interesting. Most of the work is probably in Javascript / CSS.

Sure, but that's still just jQuery (not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not Vue/React/Angular/whatever).

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

I agree, but I don't think a single file with thousands of lines if not tens of thousands would be considered "simple".

That's insane.

I assume there is some punchy infrastructure behind this though, not just a static hosted php file?

Just PHP on a Linode VPS. Not static at this moment. If it goes viral I usually generate an index.html from the index.php.

Good stuff Pieter. Simple is good.

It'll be interesting to see your code organisation. Something to learn from, as my single-page projects often get cluttered and hard to manage or add features.

Btw, for some strange reason you have me (@voidmonk) blocked on Twitter :) so I can't see your tweets.

I wonder how much is/was spent on marketing.

No ad spend, and $0 marketing spend, just my Twitter (https://twitter.com/levelsio) and Google searches

So you don't mention or count all the press coverage of the "I'm launching 12 startups in 12 months"? [1]

[1] https://levels.io/12-startups-12-months/

Yep sure, that was 6 years ago. But I didn't pay money for that.

6+ years of your life building followership. I'd say that cost a bit- but you've more than earned it. I, for one, enjoy all your stuff Pieter.

Your comment sounds like he spent the entirety of his 6+ yrs of his life building followership for the site.

6 years of your life is a price that's pretty steep. Some crimes have prison sentences shorter than that.

I wouldn't call that free.

Haha it didn't feel like a prison sentence but I see what everyone means now yes. Time investment obviously, also work into the site.

Basically a programming jobs website...

whole lot of ifs and switches in that thing LOL Reminds me of the first version of FUSEBOX in the late 90s. it was just a huge cfswitch/cfcase with a mess of cfincludes so it could load in eclipse since eclipse had a hard time back then with files over 1000 lines i think. i'm showing my age.

Duke Nukem 3D supposedly has some sort of monster switch case with hundreds or thousands of labels.

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