Desant - Open source landing pages system | Hacker News Reader

Desant - Open source landing pages system

desantapp.com

35 pointsnu7hatch8 comments

Looks cool! What're you using for the map generation? It's very fast and elegant.

Is there a way to see the front-end or how to submit entries? http://demo.desantapp.com/ is a blank page.

I'm building something similar for a well known fashion brand right now, shame I didn't see this a few weeks ago.

Deployment looks a little complex for the average business user who would get the most value out of this, but I'm not sure how/if you can simplify deploying a Rails app to where the average non-tech person can do it (does Heroku or similar have an easy way to click "Fork" and get started?).

Edit: Some useful things I've been using for my similar project are the Flot javascript charting library and the datatables.net AJAX table plugin.

Graphing is made with d3 and geo extension - learning how to use it was one of my goals for this app, it looks nice so far but doesn't have all features i wanted to implement, though.

Deployment isn't that complex, app is prepared for heroku and actually goes with few commands:

    heroku app create yourapp
    git push heroku master
    heroku addos:add cleardb:ignite
    heroku config:add ADMIN_LOGIN='admin' ADMIN_PASSWORD='generated_password_hash'
    heroku run rake db:migrate

Easy peasy! Development is super easy as well as there's configured Vagrant box available.

In case of frontend, it's disabled for this demo to prevent users from posting their emails - admin area contains only dummy auto-generated data. If you install the app on your own it will show proper, working front page.

I love seeing more and more projects having a vagrant box as "run and try"-option.

One minor nitpick though: From vagrant 1.1 on, the gem will cease to exist. You might want to recommend the installer early.

This is super cool looking, but it's not clear how one creates or edits the landing pages. There is nothing in admin I can see from iPhone to do so.

Thanks

Josh

It's programatic system, you just fork, edit index page to your needs and deploy your own version. Maybe future releases will introduce some admin area for managing that stuff, but so far it's only MVP release after one-weekend rumble :)

brilliant app! Two suggestions:

I think your list of users/referring websites, etc. would be much better with pagination rather than infinite scroll.

also clicking on the # of users next to a country - should open a popup with a filtered list of users (which should be downloadable as a CSV by itself).

Thanks for the suggestions! Will plan them for future iterations.

Love it :)

One suggestion, show small flags next to people in the list view as well, with the name of the country in the title attribute.

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