How I built 7books in under 4 weeks
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Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks
#2Good for you, it always warms my heart to see someone taking these first steps. Try to notice your own reactions, its good to be reminded of when you yourself were a novice.
Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks
#3This is really great. I love the concept and simplicity.
Here are some suggestions:
1. Use the Amazon API to autosuggest book titles and author names.
2. Normalize the lists. That is, count up which books are recommended the most and use those statistics to recommend books.
3. List similar lists on each list :) Lists that list the same books might be related. If they list two or more of the same books, they're probably related.
But even if you don't change a thing, it's still a great little project!
Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks
#4How much did that domain name cost?
These are similar, they may help inspire you for features: http://www.goodreads.com/ http://www.shelfari.com/
Keep it up!
Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks
#5I built a similar site - http://www.instabrary.com awhile back which is pretty much the exact same idea. It's running now but since I moved to Heroku you can't register. I should look into that.
The Rails source is here: https://github.com/marcus/Instabrary
Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks
#6Thank you, thank you for creating a product blog whose header links back to the actual product page.
It seems like every other product blog that I visit is intentionally keeping me from being able to navigate to the actual product!
Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks
#7As someone who within the last two weeks picked up app engine and created an MVP of my own http://www.pubcontweets.com, I can not only relate to your story but also applaud you for sharing the it as well as your code. Thanks.
Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks
#8Thank you, thank you for creating a product blog whose header links back to the actual product page. It seems like every other product blog that I visit is intentionally keeping me from being able to navigate to the actual product!
Well, although that's one step better than blogs that completely lack a link back to the product, I don't find backlinking the actual blog logo to be all that intuitive. Often times I see blog logos that are variants of the actual product logo indicating you're looking at the blog, and so it doesn't make much sense to hide the link there. Just make an explicit link to the product in the sidebar or something. I can't tell you how many times I've closed a product blog page after growing frustrated with not being able to spot a link to the product quickly.
Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks
#9Jesus, 4 weeks? That's awesome. I've been learning on and off for a few years now, and have recently buckled down to finally get something done. What are some lessons you learned for building your next project? Also, it seems like you've got a good eye for design. With a bit more practice and experience, you could likely make some great looking sites. It certainly looks a lot better than sites I've seen made by more seasoned coders.
Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks
#10to go from not knowing how to make a to doing all of this in 4 weeks is majorly impressive. and the site has a really nice, unique look and feel. good work!