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Show HN: Over engineered weekend project to aggregate top Reddit r/aww posts

topcuteanimals.com

8 pointsukjadoon6 comments

Author here! The idea was to collect the top posts from r/aww and show them in an extremely simple to use responsive interface. Even though the site may seem very simple, being a backend architect, I think I over engineered it. Here is the technology breakdown:-

* Laravel 5.0 * A Digital Ocean micro server (512MB Ram) * Laravel Forge setup * Blackfire integration * New Relic integration * Papertrailapp integration for streaming error logs * Beanstalkd for queued jobs. * Zapier integration * Pure CSS framework * Cloudinary CDN and image manipulation * MySQL * Redis server * Import.io to create a crawler API * Bitbucket private repo * Import.io for the Reddit and Imgur crawler

So what does HN think about my work?

I started out with having an idea that I should always show a random image when clicking on the "Show me another one!" button. However, I quickly ran into problems when people would see repeated posts as the MySQL RAND() function might return repeating post ids. Creating a more complicated algorithm to save all the posts in a cache that had already been viewed and also saved in a cookie created some unnecessary complexity. In the end, I ended up just showing the last posted image and the button basically takes you to the previous post every time you click it (or tap if using a touch device).

I used Import.io to write a crawler API to fetch the top posts. Then I wrote some cron jobs to automate calling the API to fetch the latest posts every three hours. The actual job runs via a beanstalkd queue as a Laravel artisan command.

I didn't want to hotlink the images directly from Imgur as I didn't want to leech on their bandwidth, so I used Cloudinary to display the pictures instead. One advantage was that with the Cloudinary API, I could resize the images and/or convert gifs to an MP4 on the fly (MP4 files take a lot less bandwidth to deliver). However, since I am not making any money from the site and wanted to stay on the free plan, I decided to mostly ignore gif files as they take a lot of bandwidth and disk space on Cloudinary. The Laravel queued command also takes care of uploading the images to Cloudinary.

For a responsive design, I used Yahoo's Pure.css framework. It was fairly easy to work with and basically its just two Laravel blade view files that display the site's content (a master template and a view template). I also added a Twitter account, which can be found at http://www.twitter.com/topcuteanimals as well as a Facebook page. I used a neat service called Zapier to post pictures from my site over to the Facebook and Twitter pages on an hourly basis. However, I didn't want to run out of the free plan for Zapier so now it is limited to just one update a day. All the scheduled cron jobs are handled via Laravel Forge which has honestly been a joy to work with. I have been using Git flow via Source tree and host my code in a private Git repository on Bitbucket. This helps with the fact that whenever I plan to make a release or a hotfix, each push to the master branch makes an automated deployment to the live site thanks to Laravel Forge's helpful integration. I also use Redis to cache the posts so as not to hammer my tiny server's MySQL database too much. Overall most of the site was done within a day with incremental updates that I have been adding in my free time over the past couple of weeks.

It's nice to see someone else who likes Laravel.

From a design perspective, I'd like it if the image wasn't flush with the header, and I'd like it if I didn't have to scroll to see the whole image.

From a usability perspective, it'd be nice if the button to load the next picture was in a static and predictable position, that way I didn't have to move my mouse to continue through the chain.

Overall nice app. :)

Thank you for the input! I'll see if I can implement those changes as soon as I get a chance. Laravel is great and it sort of brought me back to PHP web development from Python and with Laracasts, building projects with Laravel has been great.

Static positioned buttons have been added to the site now. I also released the source which can be found here https://github.com/ukjadoon/topcuteanimals

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