How I built an application in two days | Hacker News Reader

How I built an application in two days

rm2kdev.net

48 pointsrm2kdev38 comments

Also sorry for being "that guy" but I have to point out that SSL is not used anywhere in the app, including the credit card entry in the billing section.

Nice work though! :)

Thanks for your compliments and no worries you can be that guy today :P

Regarding the payments side of things I am using the client side stripe library. Basically what happens when you input card details and hit submit a secure async push is made to stripe's servers where the card details are stored a call back is made with a token to your browse and ONLY that token is sent to my server.

While having SSL would be nice and make the clients feel more comfortable rest assured the payments side of things is still secure

SSL WILL BE ADDED :) Probably over next weekend my next personal 'sprint'

Nice site. I like how the colour changes as you register. Did you consider digitalocean? Seems like it might be 1/3 the cost with better performance?

Thanks for the suggestion, I replied to the other gentlemen about this the only reason I didn't consider them was I had no prior experience or knew anyone who'd used them before. Their pricing looked 'too good to be true' but if HN is suggesting them I will defiantly look at their services soon :)

It looks like you are over-paying for a lot of services. Like someone else mentioned, for starting out something like Linode or Digital Ocean would be cheaper. (and they don't charge for bandwidth until over 1 TB I believe)

Also, 8c/message for SMS is very high. Twilio has international SMS service that ranges from .75c to around 3c a message. (disclaimer, I have interned there)

On the implementation, it also seems like a NoSQL DB like MongoDB might not be the best choice. This is because it seems like you are dealing with a lot of relational information, which is significantly more complicated to implement in a non-relational database that is not designed for that.

These are just my opinions. I like the front-end design!

Thanks for your suggestions, i had not considered Digital Ocean purely because I'd not had any experience with it or know anyone who's used it before.

Regarding the relational data that is one of the challenges I faced when building the application. I used NoSQL because I had recently had some experience with mongo and mongoose thought it would be easier then I realised I would have to begin making multiple selects and concatenating data together to bring back average ping stats for the dashboard etc which made it somewhat harder.

None of your text inputs seem to allow me to enter anything in firefox 26 on archlinux.

I'll take a look into that tomorow!! its 11:30pm here :(!

admin.css - Line 6846.

padding: 20px 10px; which firefox obeys and pads in from the edges meaning the actual "viewport" is none-existent.

If you reduce the padding down to 2px the text will come back but the vertical height on your inputs will reduce (I leave that to you) :).

http://i.imgur.com/Ap7fA6r.jpg

Thank you :) I will download and install a copy of firefox see if I can fix this up!

Just in case (since you don't have FF installed you might not be a user) grab Firebug at the same time :).

Makes life much easier.

Also check out nexmo I used them on a project last year (UK based) and they where excellent, also looking quickly 6.5c per text ;).

Thanks a lot, I used to be a Firefox user when I was younger maybe 7 years ago. It started to get very 'windows vista ish' and my really really poor pc couldn't handle it so maybe 4 - 5 years ago I switched to chrome... unfortunately that seems to be heading down the same path.

Im not sure what modern firefox so lets see :D

I use them interchangeably as some of the FireFox tools are better than Chrome's and vice versa (it's also handy for impromptu functional testing to switch around as I catch stuff before proper testing does).

Regrettably that was my poor decision to launch without checking it in Firefox, nevertheless bug fixed now :) learn from your mistakes haha

To not test a website on Firefox before launch isn't a bit extreme? (text input invisible is pretty bad)

it was a two day project some things I didn't have time to really 'clean up' that's not to say it ends with two days of work :) I will be clearing up many of the small issues and growing the site's features much more over the next few weeks. Maybe even making the switch to digital ocean and twillio

hmmm, front page of hacker news (your target audience). May want to fix it now! :)

Its a good opportunity. Site looks good otherwise

I like it, impressive for such a short amount of time.

I did notice the site is very slow, is that your hosting (HN effect) or the client side stack you are using? Navigating the pages was taking 5-6 seconds for me.

That would be the HN Effect. The post has exploded the site receiving something like 10 - 50 hits per second.

It may also be the server is hosted in Sydney on Amazon's ec2 so if your far from Sydney Australia that might also contribute to a page load time of about 2 - 3 seconds :) the rest is probably HN Effect

Oh right a 21,000 mile round trip would explain some of it ;)

An absolute minimum of 112ms of it ;).

On your register page you have "27/7" support. Is that meant to be 24/7 or is "27/7" something which I'm not aware of?

Fixed ;) thank you for pointing that out.

Thanks for pointing that out! ill fix it :D thats a typo or is it some kind of new age support

Also on the billing page "You are currently on the tophat plan" (no space)

That's because I'm using the planid to display the name I have to do some back end changes to subscriptions so I can have 'Friendly names' :)

None of the login / register / etc links are shown for me. In fact I can't see any links in the navbar at all... Using Chrome v24.

Also, where is the pricing plan? Maybe that's just another link i'm missing but feels like this should be on the homepage / register screen somewhere (i munged the URL to sign up).

Seems pretty cool though.

I wish that hyperlinks could be used in a more Wikipedia like sense (I.e. linking to description s, other relevant content, instead of just being used to get links for Site Loader.

You should make “PLEB Stack” open source. Great work!

Early on saturday it was LEMP Framework :) i added some more and cleaned it up a little then it became PLEB :P https://github.com/rm2kdev/LEMPFramework

Feel free to check out lemp :)

Nice design/layout, not bad for a 2 day project.

Thanks, i cant take all the credit i am using twitter bootstrap for the ux

Nice!

Sorry for being "that guy" but this is not a full application neither did you spend two days making it work.

:'(

I'm sorry you feel this way :( but I understand it is a small application. By Full Application I meant 'completed the goals it set out to do' obviously no application can ever be truly finished and I will be adding more over time :)

Yes, let me use a monitoring system running on a single instance to let me know when important things go down.

How about no?

It's 2014. HA is part of the MVP when you are charging people money or providing a business-critical service (even if it's free).

> It's 2014. HA is part of the MVP when you are charging people money or providing a business-critical service (even if it's free).

Business critical and free are mutually exclusive. A free service might be business critical for a business that relies on it but that's the faulty expectation of the business, not the provider. You get what you pay for.

From the article:

> 1. After evaluating a bunch of cloud server hosts I decided to go with an Amazon EC2 Tiny Instance running Ubuntu 12.04 my reasoning behind this was influenced by price and the technologies used in the development of the web application (which will be explained in a section below) namely NodeJS and MongoDB this comes at a cost of roughly $15/mo we’ll also be needing 1 elastic IP address and a few entries in route53 + $1

I'm a big fan of AWS but this won't work. I'm assuming that the "tiny" instance is an m1.micro. If so then then it will CPU throttle at the slightest load. You can run a whole bunch on a small slice of CPU but m1.micros are a different animal. Anybody that has tried running a build server on one knows that a compile alone will hang the instance.

Again, you get what you pay for.

While I agree with every point you make here about the EC2 Tiny m1micros. A good test for the instances was this article since posting this the site has received over 10,000 visitors and at one point in time it was dealing with 10 - 50 visitors a second while this isn't ideal to run 'business critical' software on a tiny instance if it ever had to deal with such a large array of consumers on a daily basis it would be scaled immediately to something more robust.

However the past 10 hours have prooven that the m1's do have some balls :) both the site and the processing exist on the same machine and have only marginally struggled with 0 downtime from the HNEffect

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