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Review my weekend project: Webapp to add CSS to any website and share the result

csspivot.com

11–20 of 98 posts

Re: Review my weekend project: Webapp to add CSS to any website and share the result

#11
One of my favourite HN projects in a long time.

You'll have to do a blog post on how you pulled it off some time.

Design feedback is going to be so friggin' easy from now on. If you ever begin to lose money on this, I'd love to buy a premium account or look into a subscription model.

(Regardless, you should look into a premium user program. Some ideas: prioritized bandwidth, custom shorturl for credit(?) such as //, a profile to save a history and metrics similar to URL-shortening services. No ads.

It'd seriously be stupid not to monetize this; I can't emphasize how much I love your concept.)

You could also reach out to companies looking for redesigns (or -aligns) and find a way to match them with a designer.

Remember to put up a link on Forrst. Heck, you could turn this into a design community by your own, where people share redesigns of sites - and you could implement a favourite and upvote system to reward the best ones. Showing users how shitty airline websites could look - not just as Adobe mock-ups - is very powerful. Set up some basic Django, include some thumbnails of each site link and implement a basic upvote and favourite system - boom, Dribbble for CSS. Scale later. Basically imitate all the monetization Kyle has done for Forrst.

As someone gravitating between college and no job, finding a way to prove my skills publicly is very difficult. This service would be great to leverage and would make it very easy to accomplish this feat. A premium user system could also allow people to include a pretty embed csspivot portfolio.

And then there's the whole let-me-show-you-what-I-can-do-for-you-application discussion[1].

If I were anyone on HN, I'd pitch him an offer for a banner on the site, because there's a very good chance that this blows up and goes viral. If I had a site or service to plug, I'd already have done this. Here is his Twitter profile, the only contact information I can see: http://twitter.com/metachris.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2361034

Re: Review my weekend project: Webapp to add CSS to any website and share the result

#12
Not quite sure the implementation you have (whether you iframe it or pull content in and redisplay it), but thought of a few suggestions:

1) inject the style tags w/ javascript and it will refresh the CSS content without doing a page reload. We do this on our editors and works well:)

2) Make the text box more coder friendly (allow indents, for one).

Great idea!

Re: Review my weekend project: Webapp to add CSS to any website and share the result

#13
I like the idea. Here's how I envision it:

Show me all the existing CSS (with syntax-highlighting) in an editor in a sidebar. Let me modify that or add to it, then share the result. Also, highlight new or modified code somehow. Basically, a save-able, shareable, Firebug editor with diffs.

Re: Review my weekend project: Webapp to add CSS to any website and share the result

#15
post #5

I have totally hypothetical (but related) question, though: to what extent does a site's CSS need to be changed, for that CSS to be one's own? I'm just not sure to what legal limits people can use your site to save CSS code from other websites that aren't their own? Again, I have no expertise in this particular question, but maybe you want to include a small disclaimer...?

Might be a moot point for this app, since it only _appends_ arbitrary CSS and doesn't modify the existing. That's a good question, though. I bet the WordPress GPL decision might have some relevance to it.

Good idea on the _appends_ - who wants to save the entire code for each iteration, rather than just the changes? (hitting myself over head) haha About Wordpress: their explanation seems more marketing-related rather than practical: http://codex.wordpress.org/License Maybe going GPL reflects a core change in their business model, now that they're hitched with all the Windows Live blogs?

Re: Review my weekend project: Webapp to add CSS to any website and share the result

#19
post #13

I like the idea. Here's how I envision it: Show me all the existing CSS (with syntax-highlighting) in an editor in a sidebar. Let me modify that or add to it, then share the result. Also, highlight new or modified code somehow. Basically, a save-able, shareable, Firebug editor with diffs.

I like the simplicity though. No need to make it busy and bloated. Most browsers already have a Firebug or something on them already (or you can add them yourself). No reason to have two.

Re: Review my weekend project: Webapp to add CSS to any website and share the result

#20
post #16

This is pretty creative. Question about the implementation: are you just using urllib to read the contents of the provided URL, then overriding the page's CSS with the user provided CSS?

Yes, it works by proxying the request and injecting CSS and the header at the right places.
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