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How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

7bks.com

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Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#51

Post by topcat31 »

tommusic wrote: post #49

Great job learning a language (and an infrastructure) with such speed! I've been building something with a similar aim on and off for a long time now, and it's neat to see in the comments that there are at least three others already out there. I wonder if there is something that will lead to more widespread awareness/adoption of sites like these. Or are we better off trying to pick a target market smaller than [all b…

Frankly I have no idea :)

Having only just launched I don't know what the market looks like. I strongly suspect that the site will end up gravitating towards one kind of user. But who knows! 22books.com (mentioned below) gets used by quite a lot of school teachers so there are plenty of niches out there.

Let me know how you get on - happy to share thoughts :)

Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#52

Post by javery »

topcat31 wrote: post #29
javery wrote: post #27

This is awesome - I built a site called 22books a couple years ago as a way to learn Ruby... it took me a little longer than 4 weeks but I think I launched with more functionality. I haven't done much with the site but it actually ended up getting used by teachers and librarians so I would feel bad ever shutting it down. http://22books.com

Hey mate - we spoke on email a few weeks ago! I was gonna drop you a line about the site but things have been a bit manic recently. I think I'm going in a slightly different direction to you so hopefully you don't mind too much that our sites are similar. I'm going to look at exploring the community angle in the coming months so hopefully we won't tread on each others toes too much.

Not at all - like I said before it was just a hobby and never meant to be a serious thing.

Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#55

Post by peripitea »

topcat31 wrote: post #23

Holy wow - thank you so much everyone for your feedback and comments! I leave for 2 hours (taking a tour of Zappos in Vegas, amazing and life changing btw) and this thing goes crazy! I've enabled billing in appengine as I'm nearly over quota: http://imgur.com/SN0WQ.png If anyone has any tips to optimise my outgoing bandwidth it would be very much appreciated! Hopefully I caught it in time to avoid any real outages. I…

I took a quick look, and I don't see anything that stands out. Assets are mostly cached properly, nothing is excessively large, gzip is on, etc. You've been getting a bit over 4 requests per second for the past three hours, plus some more before that, so roughly 50k views. 1 GB of data transfer means each view is averaging 20k. That still seems a bit higher than it should, but it's low enough that I'd worry about other things way before you start optimizing the bandwidth.

Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#56

Post by MortenK »

raghus wrote: post #12
neilkod wrote: post #7

As 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.

Stupid question: what does MVP stand for here?

Microsoft Valued Professional. I'm building one too. They're real fun to play with though easy to anger.

Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#57

Post by MisterWebz »

blhack wrote: post #22
MisterWebz wrote: post #18

Very impressive. I've been learning Python for almost a whole year and I haven't even got one completely functional app. I've got tons of unfinished ones though.

FINISH THEM! Ask for help if you need it! I started doing "web stuff" about 3 years ago and have learned sooo much just by forcing myself to do it. It's so funny to me to see how much I've changed, I came across one of the first ever "apps" that I made a few days ago. It was a DVD cataloger that I made my Dad for his birthday (He glanced at it, went "huh", then bought some commercial version of the same thing...humph…

When in the middle of a project, i suddenly get a "better" idea and abandon the current project to work on the better one.

Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#59

Post by ericlavigne »

topcat31 wrote: post #35
zachster wrote: post #3

This 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 probab…

Thanks Zachster - some of those are definitely on my road map. I wanted to launch early though so as soon as I was partially happy with it I set it live. I can add those features later. The ajax thing is definitely a strong priority - but I need to learn how to do ajax first and I think it's pretty hard...!

I highly recommend this free, online book for learning more about jQuery.

http://jqfundamentals.com/

(AJAX is chapter 7)

Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#60

Post by blhack »

MisterWebz wrote: post #57
blhack wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FINISH THEM! Ask for help if you need it! I started doing "web stuff" about 3 years ago and have learned sooo much just by forcing myself to do it. It's so funny to me to see how much I've changed, I came across one of the first ever "apps" that I made a few days ago. It was a DVD cataloger that I made my Dad for his birthday (He glanced at it, went "huh", then bought some commercial version of the same thing...humph…

When in the middle of a project, i suddenly get a "better" idea and abandon the current project to work on the better one.

Is it that the idea is better, or is it that you hit a wall in your programming?

(This has been my excuse to myself before)

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