Comment by smalter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smalter | Hacker News Reader

I just want to throw out a startup idea that I have, that I hope someone is working on.

Codecademy meets Geocities

I did my first web programming on Geocities when I was in middle school. I saw an awesome website my friend made with crazy animated gifs and pictures of Shaq. I wanted one for my own.

I went home, and in a week, I banged out my own site with pictures of Stephon Marbury and a pageview counter and more animated gifs. It was glorious.

I've only been able to learn by doing and the best kind of doing is creating something. I'd love to see someone have lessons in an online, interactive programming environment a la Codecademy, but have the result exist and be live on the web, and provide a basic development environment to just build stuff.

In other words, lesson one is "Hello World". When I'm done, my app is available at http://newapp23.codecademymeetsgeocities.com. I'll show my friends. I'll change the text to read "Hello suckas!" I'll move on to the next lesson, or I'll just start playing. I can toggle between viewing my app as a progression of lessons, or as files and folders.

If someone's working on this, do let me know.

We had exactly this at Bloc (formerly Trybloc.com).

There's definitely space for this, but what we've discovered is that it has the same problems as Codecademy-esque services. You can do various things to attempt to keep users engaged, but at the end of the day nobody is paying for anything and therefore has very little invested in the process.

That's not to say it can't work -- perhaps it can. But it's been tried and the variables need to be tweaked just right, and it's a hard combination to find.

I agree, I'd love this too. I learned in a similar manner as what you've described.

The hard part is finding something that people might actually want to do. Geocities worked for this because you actually wanted a Geocities website. It would be difficult to start a company with the assumption that you were going to create some new "thing" that people are going to actually want just for the side-effect of their learning to code.

On the other hand, arguably Wordpress, Scratch[1] and even the Chrome, Apple, etc. app stores have already filled this niche in different domains (PHP, kids, browser plugins, apps).

[1] http://scratch.mit.edu/

We have this now with services like heroku and Google App engine.

Heroku is probably the easiest to get started with and is generously free (you can run actual sites from that free instance). At work when we were mentoring a boss's nephew we had him going to Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial and he had a site up on heroku in about an hour and was really have a great time seeing things iterate as he pushed up changes.

You don't get newapp32.codeacademymeetsgeocities.com but you do get something like rushing-waterfall-2311.heroku.com and you can customize that rushing-waterfall-2311 should you care too (still for free).

I wonder if a revenue stream would be partnerships with hosting services. I guess it would just be plain old affiliates, something like how Facebook recommends Heroku when creating an application via developers.facebook.com. "You've finished our tutorials and your website is ready! Want to take the next step? Check out Heroku and Dreamhost!"

I learned the same way as you, using free website hosting (with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanadoo) in my local library in 2003. While my friends played Runescape I harnessed the power of <marquee>

Udacity + Google App Engine. Conveniently free, completely awesome.

Is there a course on udacity that teaches you how to build apps on Google App Engine? They do have one on building web apps but it does not specify which platform they use (if any).

The web application course is taught by Steve Huffman (creator of Reddit) and the first lesson is actually to write a "Hello World" script and publish it on App Engine.

For anyone new to Python, I highly recommend Udacity. It's still a little unbelievable to me that it's free.

*edit: I should have mentioned that this course uses app engine throughout it's entirety. Not just the first lesson :)

thanks, smelter. keep your eye on codecademy soon :)

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