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Comment by lilouartz | Hacker News Reader

I am giving this a shot.

I have been hacking together the initial prototype. I am going to start by just aggregating the data and at first distributing it as Google Sheets document. I figured, this will be good enough experiment to understand whether people even want this as a service.

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Cool, good luck! I run a similar (in concept, not topic) "awesome list" that I'm also in the process of turning into searchable/filterable website... very slowly. In my case I'm not sure about monetization (it's important to me that it remain a good and fair community resource, but if it can buy a beer or two a month, that'd be cool).

Anyway, if you're thinking of going the easy-to-make route for this initial pass, might I suggest giving Airtable a look? It creates better UIs than GSheets does, while being almost as easy (and in some cases easier) to use. Some examples:

https://www.airtable.com/templates/restaurant-field-guide/ex...

https://www.airtable.com/templates/apartment-hunting/expPfTz...

https://www.airtable.com/templates/hiking-trip-bucket-list/e...

Thanks so much for the tip!

Do you happen to know if Airtable documents rank on Google?

One of the reasons for preferring Google Sheets is because I know from experience that I come across many public Google Sheets through Google. I don't recall coming across Airtable documents, but it might be just because there are fewer of them.

I'm actually not sure about that (never thought about it, good question!).

I suppose you could embed it on a page (https://support.airtable.com/docs/creating-airtable-base-sha...) or use a third-party "portal" builder like Pory, Noloco, Softr, Bubble, etc. (can't recommend any, never used any of those, sorry).

Airtable also provides JSON outputs if you want to hook it up to a custom web app: https://airtable.com/developers/web/api/introduction (FYI, GSheets does this too https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/cjn-google-sheets-as-json-...)

If I were doing this myself, I'd probably just put the data in any spreadsheet or DB I like (including Airtable), get the JSON out, and then use something like MUI Datagrid to render it into a nice and simple frontend that I fully control: https://mui.com/x/react-data-grid/

But yeah, gsheets might be simpler then if there's an SEO benefit :)

Ended up dumping it all into a database schema. I realized that in order to do comparison, there is quite a bit processing that needs to be done to normalize data. Things like identifying chemical compounds, nutrients, etc.

This def turned out to be a lot more cost/time consuming than I expected, but I do enjoy the learning process.

Since the data will be in PostgreSQL db, I will be able to slice and dice it however I want to export it later to Airtable or other formats.

Thanks for all the recommendations!

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