The Toolbox: From Idea to Launch in 10 Hours | Hacker News Reader

The Toolbox: From Idea to Launch in 10 Hours

sachagreif.com

87 pointssgdesign29 comments

Something that I haven't mentioned in the article is that for me, Hacker News is a big motivation when doing this kind of small week-end project.

Obviously a site can get popular without HN, but having an audience to launch to plus immediate feedback feels much more gratifying to me.

Yes, that is one of the many virtues of HN. The wide audience. Not only that, but the type of audience that can and will provide constructive input.

Nothing quite like it.

Also, congrats on the project.

Do you have an email to where I could contact you?

Sure, use http://sachagreif.com/contact

I'm wondering how you manage to constantly get so many up votes for your projects (besides creating super quality content of course). Any tips on this?

Btw: I love the toolbox, super awesome site! It seems to be a little slow for me though, are you hosting this on a shared server?

Sorry, I don't have any specific tips on getting upvotes… I guess just do cool stuff!

And sorry about the slowness, it's hosted on PHPFog but I think I need to tweak some WordPress caching options to speed it up.

Yes, a caching plugin would definitely help out there! Your site was featured in the last webdesigner depot newsletter (which has around 150K subsribers I think) and when I clicked the link I could not reach your site for 5 minutes...

Have you had a look at the W3 Total Cache plugin already? This drastically speeds up sites when configured correctly.

When I finally got through to the WordPress admin, I immediately saw the problem: although the caching plugin was installed and activated, caching was turned off in the plugin’s settings page. Talk about a dumb mistake…

There are a few free load testing services that are good for catching problems with caching or concurrency. I've used http://blitz.io/ before going live to tune my caching and have survived a few HN front-pages.

Thanks, I'll definitely use this from now on!

Hi, just a heads up, I think your site has the XSS vulnerability, namely parameter "s" - common in wordpress search function. To see it in action, try adding "/?s=aaa<script>alert(16354)<%2Fscript>" at the end.

That didn't do anything for me. I'd hope WordPress escapes MySQL and JS code from query strings, that seems like a pretty big vulnerability…

I'm kind of flabbergasted at how good that Construct theme is. I've looked at themes on ThemeForest and didn't see anything of that calibre for sale. Now I'm awkwardly wondering whether I can buy a theme for my Rails site instead of amateurishly hamfisting it myself. Arggh.

edit: Wonderful collection, so many of these sites look really useful and/or inspiring. Great work man.

Try using Bootstrap - there's plenty of resources for ensuring it no longer "looks" like Bootstrap.

If you're looking for great themes, I recommend Orman Clark's work: http://www.themezilla.com/ The only problem for me was that his themes are not responsive.

Those look like Wordpress themes, though...my site is on Rails. Thanks for the suggestion nonetheless!

I often just rip the html from a Wordpress theme and use it for a rails site. Its a tiny bit of extra work, but totally worth it.

I've never bought a WP theme before - so it's not too hard to convert one for use in Rails? Just take the HTML, CSS, & JS and start putting it into the Rails structure? I'll seriously look into this option, then - thanks for the note.

So he used WordPress. Is anyone interested in a tool like WordPress with good support for easy-to-install plugins, but built on Node.js/CoffeeScript?

I ask because I have been working a tool like that for a few months and I'm pretty anxious about the reception its going to get, since I'm pretty much basing my whole life on it.

Sounds very interesting. Not sure you should be basing your whole life on it, but still curious to see it!

Is it open source? If so, I'd love to check it out. We've been working on an open source server for JavaScript developers, that has some of the modularity of Wordpress: https://github.com/deployd/deployd

Yes, everything is MIT (that I wrote). Deployd is really awesome, congratulations. I agree that having an easy way to do what looks like direct database manipulations from the browser is really useful and it seems like the rules and stuff you have set up to secure that is a very good approach. I also think that mongodb makes a lot of sense because of its flexibility and ease of use.

My thing really isn't ready to show anyone but its at https://github.com/ithkuil/cureblog at the moment. I have a bunch of stuff to do including most everything related to security. I think at first I am going to try to cheat with really simple rules possibly inserted into the everything.now function call if I can, or something. Really a lot of stuff to work out.

Considering the time span you set this up in, you should consider doing a screencast from beginning to end setting something like this up. A lot of us could learn from that, seeing a full site from beginning to launch.

What is the tool you are using for the responsive testing? http://dun4nx4d6jyre.cloudfront.net/assets/toolb-xreponsive....

I've been using a mediocre plugin for chrome to do this testing but its flaky. That looks like exactly what I want.

http://responsive.victorcoulon.fr/

Thanks for sharing and spending time to document all the steps. Impressive achievement in such a short time.

Will you continue to build on this platform or is this simply a side project?

Thanks! But I'm not sure how else I can build on it except add more sites… if you have any ideas I'd love to hear them :)

Would love to see this done for "SaSS Apps" with the same approach - less "List of Doom".

Thanks for sharing your process...

http://feedmyapp.com/ ?

This is an awesome article – thanks for explaining everything down to the detail!

Added to the top of my existing bookmark folder called "The Toolbox"

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