The Toolbox: From Idea to Launch in 10 Hours

http://sachagreif.com/the-toolbox-from-idea-to-launch-in-10-hours/

by sgdesign • 14 years ago

87 29 14 years ago

sgdesign8• 14 years ago

Something that I haven't mentioned in the article is that for me, Hacker News is a big motivation when doing this kind of small week-end project.

Obviously a site can get popular without HN, but having an audience to launch to plus immediate feedback feels much more gratifying to me.

rmATinnovafy• 14 years ago

Yes, that is one of the many virtues of HN. The wide audience. Not only that, but the type of audience that can and will provide constructive input.

Nothing quite like it.

Also, congrats on the project.

Do you have an email to where I could contact you?

sgdesign8• 14 years ago

Sure, use http://sachagreif.com/contact

maxmin2• 14 years ago

I'm wondering how you manage to constantly get so many up votes for your projects (besides creating super quality content of course). Any tips on this?

Btw: I love the toolbox, super awesome site! It seems to be a little slow for me though, are you hosting this on a shared server?

sgdesign8• 14 years ago

Sorry, I don't have any specific tips on getting upvotes… I guess just do cool stuff!

And sorry about the slowness, it's hosted on PHPFog but I think I need to tweak some WordPress caching options to speed it up.

creamyhorror3• 14 years ago

I'm kind of flabbergasted at how good that Construct theme is. I've looked at themes on ThemeForest and didn't see anything of that calibre for sale. Now I'm awkwardly wondering whether I can buy a theme for my Rails site instead of amateurishly hamfisting it myself. Arggh.

edit: Wonderful collection, so many of these sites look really useful and/or inspiring. Great work man.

sgdesign8• 14 years ago

If you're looking for great themes, I recommend Orman Clark's work: http://www.themezilla.com/ The only problem for me was that his themes are not responsive.

creamyhorror3• 14 years ago

Those look like Wordpress themes, though...my site is on Rails. Thanks for the suggestion nonetheless!

neilkelty2• 14 years ago

Try using Bootstrap - there's plenty of resources for ensuring it no longer "looks" like Bootstrap.

squish101• 14 years ago

Hi, just a heads up, I think your site has the XSS vulnerability, namely parameter "s" - common in wordpress search function. To see it in action, try adding "/?s=aaa<script>alert(16354)<%2Fscript>" at the end.

sgdesign8• 14 years ago

That didn't do anything for me. I'd hope WordPress escapes MySQL and JS code from query strings, that seems like a pretty big vulnerability…

josephhardin• 14 years ago

Considering the time span you set this up in, you should consider doing a screencast from beginning to end setting something like this up. A lot of us could learn from that, seeing a full site from beginning to launch.

neilkelty2• 14 years ago

Would love to see this done for "SaSS Apps" with the same approach - less "List of Doom".

Thanks for sharing your process...

aymeric• 14 years ago

http://feedmyapp.com/ ?

there• 14 years ago

When I finally got through to the WordPress admin, I immediately saw the problem: although the caching plugin was installed and activated, caching was turned off in the plugin’s settings page. Talk about a dumb mistake…

There are a few free load testing services that are good for catching problems with caching or concurrency. I've used http://blitz.io/ before going live to tune my caching and have survived a few HN front-pages.

sgdesign8• 14 years ago

Thanks, I'll definitely use this from now on!

sparknlaunch12• 14 years ago

Thanks for sharing and spending time to document all the steps. Impressive achievement in such a short time.

Will you continue to build on this platform or is this simply a side project?

sgdesign8• 14 years ago

Thanks! But I'm not sure how else I can build on it except add more sites… if you have any ideas I'd love to hear them :)

ilaksh2• 14 years ago

So he used WordPress. Is anyone interested in a tool like WordPress with good support for easy-to-install plugins, but built on Node.js/CoffeeScript?

I ask because I have been working a tool like that for a few months and I'm pretty anxious about the reception its going to get, since I'm pretty much basing my whole life on it.

sgdesign8• 14 years ago

Sounds very interesting. Not sure you should be basing your whole life on it, but still curious to see it!

jeffbcross• 14 years ago

Is it open source? If so, I'd love to check it out. We've been working on an open source server for JavaScript developers, that has some of the modularity of Wordpress: https://github.com/deployd/deployd

ilaksh2• 14 years ago

Yes, everything is MIT (that I wrote). Deployd is really awesome, congratulations. I agree that having an easy way to do what looks like direct database manipulations from the browser is really useful and it seems like the rules and stuff you have set up to secure that is a very good approach. I also think that mongodb makes a lot of sense because of its flexibility and ease of use.

My thing really isn't ready to show anyone but its at https://github.com/ithkuil/cureblog at the moment. I have a bunch of stuff to do including most everything related to security. I think at first I am going to try to cheat with really simple rules possibly inserted into the everything.now function call if I can, or something. Really a lot of stuff to work out.

jimrakete• 14 years ago

This is an awesome article – thanks for explaining everything down to the detail!

fakeempire• 14 years ago

What is the tool you are using for the responsive testing? http://dun4nx4d6jyre.cloudfront.net/assets/toolb-xreponsive....

I've been using a mediocre plugin for chrome to do this testing but its flaky. That looks like exactly what I want.

adamrt• 14 years ago

http://responsive.victorcoulon.fr/

studio816• 14 years ago

Added to the top of my existing bookmark folder called "The Toolbox"

The Toolbox: From Idea to Launch in 10 Hours

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