Show HN: Sandstorm-powered “Try a demo” on Etherpad front page | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Sandstorm-powered “Try a demo” on Etherpad front page

etherpad.org

35 pointspaulproteus13 comments

I like Etherpad but unless you give us a reason for posting this here that is HN-related, it should be flagged.

Hi Scott!

I think this is interesting for two reasons:

1. Open source web apps often struggle to maintain a "Try it" server. The interesting thing here is that Sandstorm (through our package ecosystem and demo server) makes that easy for any open source web app, and this is an example of that.

2. Since I wrote the code that powers that link, I thought it would be a great thing to "Show HN", per https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html "Show HN is a way to share something that you've made on Hacker News."

That's better - thank you. We (the community) just saw this as "Is it spam?"

Sorry - I thought you were a new account. I'm using the chrome extension "Hacker News Enhancement Suite" and it highlights yours in a very-similar-color-to-newbie-color.

My apologies, I downvoted before realizing that the title used to be different (as per dang's comment).

Groove Basin also has one of these buttons!

http://groovebasin.com/

Did you make this? Show HN is for showing your own work.

Edit: yup. See below.

Thanks for taking an interest!

I personally wrote the code behind Sandstorm's "appdemo" feature, which is what the "Try it now" button links to, from the Etherpad front page. Etherpad itself is not written by me; it's written by many other great people.

See e.g. https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/commits?author=pau...

I also wrote this blog post about the feature: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-02-06-app-demo.html

Happy to answer other questions if you have them!

One other possibly-cool thing is that any open source web app, when packaged for Sandstorm, can get a "Try it now" button of your own. That's what I explain at https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-02-06-app-demo.html but I figure it's worth stating clearly here in a comment, to save people a click.

Ok, great! We put "Show HN" back in the title. We also added "Sandstorm-powered" in an attempt to make it more explanatory.

Thanks so much, dang!

You also wrote the pull request adding the button to etherpad.org.

True!

https://github.com/ether/ether.github.com/pull/21

It's like irc. Irc with more formatting.

Can I insert pictures?

woo, a time slider. nice.

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