I’m just throwing this out there to see if anybody bites.
I have a web service in mind, and I was wondering if there was anybody who would be interested in helping me develop and build it. Essentially it is a system for sharing links with friends. I’ve always used Stumbleupon for this basic feature, but I must admit their service pisses me off royally. WHEN their sharing service actually works, they blatantly hijack links (loading them via their website - this pisses me off the most). In the past, there was a time when they have absolutely refused to share a particular link because the subject of the link violated some policy of theirs (this was a long time ago, it was a legit link to some blog or something, but the fact that they did that and probably still do it annoys me severely).
I want to build something that is simple and free, without all the bull.
I’ve been mulling this thing over for a very long time now, and I am itching to get a prototype up and running, but I don’t necessarily know what I’m doing - as with most of the stuff I do, I’m going to wing it.
I think the service would work very well as a Node application (Javascript). At the moment I have my heart set on using Meteor, which can be hooked in to a number of different front-end frameworks (like Angular), but at the moment I’ll just keep it as simple as possible, and most likely just initially prototype it with [s]Bootstrap, since that is fairly popular, and very easily available within Meteor.[/] (Looking at Semantic, but may just stick with the default Blaze UI system)
The service can be monetized at some point via ads or preferably some other revenue generating methods (i hate ads and will block them always) - I don’t know anything about this aspect though, so it’s not a priority.
Anyway, if you’re interested in maybe helping me out, let me know.
So far I’ve created the basic app shell using meteor, and have initialized the git repo, which is synched with my gitlab instance. I’ve decided to go with SemanticUI for the user interface widgets for the time being (although this will probably end up being a permanent thing). I’ve been reading up on how to use it and essentially just have a basic ui set up based on some example layouts. I’ve started splitting up the UI in to Spacebars templates (similar to Handlebars).
As users are an important part of the service, I’ve added various account services (login with facebook, login with google, twitter, etc) as well as a local account service. I want users to be able to sign up/sign in with the service using the easiest method for them. The hassle with using external services for login is that I will need to set up an application on the various services, so I’m not going to do that right now, and will only support local accounts during prototyping.
Meteor is very flexible with application structure, so I’m going to sort of go with what I’ve picked up from my copy of Discover Meteor, and what I’ve seen in some tutorials. This can be changed with relative ease later, if necessary.
For what it’s worth, I’m currently running a Windows based dev environment in a VM, using Jetbrains Webstorm 10 (requires JDK not JRE) for the IDE (using the zip download, not windows installer), and Chrome as the browser, although this can just as easily be done in a linux desktop VM.
I’m in the same boat. If you want to learn something new, then tag along. There’s no obligations. Honestly, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m winging it. I’m a few steps ahead at this point, but it’s not difficult to catch up, and I’m happy to share my copy of Discover Meteor with you temporarily, although alternatively the official Meteor tutorial should cover things just as well.)
If anything, I would highly recommend setting up a dev VM (using Oracle VirtualBox - but whatever floats your boat) running Xubuntu (I’ve spent a fair amount of time comparing the various flavours of Ubuntu, and Xubuntu is tops, followed by Ubuntu Gnome (aka Gubuntu in my parlance) - just ask and I’ll post a how-to on getting this set up, although you can do this on Windows just as easily if you don’t mind cluttering up your install and don’t want to mess with VMs - or you rather want to set up a Windows VM).
Yes, sadly my JavaScript skills also consists of copying something from Stack Overflow and at best maybe changing the text. But I would love to see how this pans out.
I am also an avid copy and paster of Stack Overflow, however I have not visited there for this project - yet.
I am a king of procrastination. It has literally taken me years to get this far with this particular project, but what I’ve done now is to scrap everything I have done thus far (which wasn’t much at all), and pull in some boilerplate UI code, so that I can at least get logins working. Login works. Yay. I’m going to remove the third party login systems until I’m closer to deployment. Local login is fine for prototype. This last exercise has re-iterated that I know nothing, Jon Snow, about CSS. Actually, I know enough to be dangerous, but not quite enough to get that damned element aligned exactly how I want it without affecting completely unrelated items. So I have raised an issue in my CVS for me to tackle later. I’m not going to let something stupid like being picky over an interface element halt me.
I want the login to be as simple as possible. Email address and password, done. But then it occurred to me that having a public profile name is probably desired, particularly if you don’t want your email address slathered all over the site for everybody to see. So I’ll need to configure the registration system to require a username.
