Kicksend Practices Part I – Backend & Web | Hacker News Reader

Kicksend Practices Part I – Backend & Web

blog.kicksend.com

43 pointsskyfallsin9 comments

Please tell us about your business model. It is far more intriguing :)

Please change the link of the logo to the homepage of the site and not of the blog (or put there a link somewhere to the homepage, "Send Files" is not obvious enough).

> The Kicksend web app [...] consumes our API the same way as our other apps do.

A result of this is that your app does not work if javascript is disabled. And as a NoScript user, I'll have to carefully consider if I want to whitelist you. (Hint: Quite often, I don't bother. Especially if the site doesn't at least degrade politely ["We're sorry, but our service requires JS..."], which Kicksend does not.)

Don't get me wrong -- I think this is a very clean solution. There are just trade-offs to consider. And, to be fair, enabling both client-side and server-side consumption of an external API -- all within the same app -- is probably more of a headache than it is worth.

I used to concern myself with such potential issues but people like you are usually less than a fraction of a % of the users. Anyone who has javascript disabled in 2012 should be pretty used to websites being broken and I would expect they know how to turn it on if they want to.

In my experience the only reasonable argument to support non-javascript users was web crawlers but even that is becoming less of a problem.

However, if your web application seems to have a significant percentage of non-javascript users then obviously you probably would have never used backbone or considered this API approach to begin with.

Yes, and I didn't intend to sound like I disagree with Kicksend's approach. Being broken for a fraction of your users is just the nature of the web. It's the reason I don't usually bother to support IE7 and below.

That said, there's a case to be made for least checking to see how the site looks in, say, IE6, or with JS disabled. There are a few easy solutions to mitigate the fact that it might be totally broken. (For instance, a noscript tag, or a polite message reminding you to update your browser if you are able.)

"And as a NoScript user, I'll have to carefully consider if I want to whitelist you."

I'm sorry, but this is pretty silly (and getting sillier every year this group of NoScript users continues to fuss about not being able to access working applications without javascript being enabled.)

If you want to cripple yourself, fine; but don't expect developers to bend over backward for .002% of their visitors.

0.002% is an exaggeration, but I understand your point completely. Wasn't intending to come off as crass. Just pointing-out a trade-off. (And I do believe there are more non-JSers out there than we realize, many of them not by choice.) Kicksend doesn't even attempt to let me know I'm not supported, and just presents me with a broken page.

I guess in this day and age pointing that out just makes me sound like I'm boo-hooing.

Yes, yes, and it doesn't work in Links browser! What sort of an amateur job this site is?! How do they ever expect to get me as a customer?

I don't feel entitled to a working non-js version of the site. Far from it. (As I stated, it's probably not worth it.) Kicksend should do what works best for them.

That said, it would be nice if they at least told me they require JS instead of giving me an empty and broken page, but I guess I'm in such a minority that I should be used to this kind of thing by now.

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