The usability of the payments form is poor. It doesn't state which fields are required (if it's all of them, it should say so at the top). I understand not remembering the credit card number or CVN between requests, but it also forgets the expiry date, and the country. I had to resubmit several times because of this. Fortunately in my case I had the patience to go through it regardless, but given the amount of research indicating people's willingness to drop out of payment processes halfway through, this is something really worth fixing.
Showoff
41–50 of 222 posts
Re: Showoff
#42Awesome. I'm definitely a potential paying customer. Two suggestions and a question: * How about a free trial for unlimited access or some other kind of cancellation guarantee? * Minor one, but the dark contrast on your website UI is about equivalent to the background on a typical lightbox...i.e. it reads "disabled" to me on first glance. One question: I assume I could map a CNAME record to the showoff URL? (So cooki…
I second the dark contrast point. My first reaction on the site was "omg, what can I do to put some color and some life here". I even tried playing with the bookmarks on the top right corner to see if they would light up the site.
I kept expecting a bright background image to load, or a dynamic popup to appear. Even fully loaded, the page looks incomplete.
Re: Showoff
#43I just use dyndns.org. free and easy to use and update
Yes indeed, not as easy as "show 80" though
nope, easier - I have the following aliased as 'ddu':
lynx -dump -auth=user:mypass "http://members.dyndns.org/nic/update?hostname=myhost.dyndns.org
If you aren't UNIXy you can use one of the dozens of update clients:
http://www.dyndns.com/support/clients/
dyndns is just one provider. you could host it yourself. There are dozens of routers and clients that support DDNS protocol, no need to reinvent things.
Re: Showoff
#44One note about the setup. When you have multiple ssh keys available, the "pick one" menu looks like this:
Choose the public key you'd like to use:
[0] id_dsa.pub
[1] id_rsa.pub
[q] Quit
This should start with 1, not 0.
Re: Showoff
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because "show 3000" is much easier than setting up apache, turning on apache, forwarding ports, and giving them your IP.
Ah, gotcha. So the product that is being sold is simplicity. Are you the creator? If so, I would suggest: - more contrast between text and background - explain who the intended user is (web dev w/o strong LAMP background. I would find it easier to turn all that stuff on than to try to use a new product, and it's not worth even $1 to me to do that... so I'm clearly not your target customer) - explain what your value p…
Well, to be fair, and this is personal opinion, Showoff has little to do with whether or not a developer has a strong LAMP background (or .NET, or Haskell, or insert-your-favorite-stack here). And yet it has everything to do with whether or not a developer has a strong LAMP/whatever background. Showoff is not intended to replace your stack--at all. In fact, this product came from a strong server-side background. If you find it easier to set up Apache & MySQL & DNS records and all that to show a client/person a development site/feature you are working on locally (that has not yet been moved to a server), that's fine. Slightly masochistic, but still fine.
It's just that's more than most of us, as well as most of the devs we know, want to have to do to share local projects-still-in-development with our teams and clients.
Example use cases:
CASE ONE. You are working on a new site or feature for a Django/Ruby/.NET site on your local box. You've been banging away at it for the last couple hours, and are trying to explain it to your client, coworker, boss, or friend. You have it running locally just fine, are playing with it at http://localhost:1234/ and it looks pretty good. Everything's in good shape to show off your great new thing. If only they could both see it & interact with it, they'd be able to try it out and let you know what they think. How are you going to do this?
-Option 1: Leverage your strong LAMP/whatever background & ssh to your development server, get all your proj files up-to-date, migrate/upgrade a db schema, restart your instance, test everything out to make sure there were no unforeseen impacts from the change before you let anyone else see it (you don't want them to hit the page & get a 500 (you do test before you let anyone try a new feature, right?)), then paste the URL to your client, coworker, boss, or friend.
-Option 2: switch to a shell & execute `show 8000`, then paste the URL to your client, coworker, boss, or friend.
CASE TWO. You are updating a site that's been around for a long time and is already live on the web. Some important changes and new features have been requested & you've been banging 'em out for a couple hours (or days). You need to get them before your client, coworkers, boss, or friend before they are live on the site. You currently have everything running locally at http://localhost:1234/ and it looks good to you. Maybe you have a few questions about whether you're on the right tracks. What'd be really nice is if you could put up what you have, let your client, coworkers, boss, or friend check it out, and maybe go thru a few page refreshes rapidly to see some other options (especially helpful with CSS changes/fixes).
-Option 1: Leverage your strong LAMP/whatever background & ssh to your development server, get all your proj files up-to-date (including making sure the dev site is exactly identical to the live site and then apply your changes), migrate/upgrade a db, restart your instance, test everything out to make sure there were no unforeseen impacts from the change before you let anyone else see it (you don't want them to hit the page & get a 500 (you do test before you let anyone try a new feature, right?)), then paste the URL to your client, coworker, boss, or friend. Time to try the next change? Repeat all over again.
-Option 2: switch to a shell; execute `show 8000`; paste the URL to your client, coworker, boss, or friend. Time to try the next change? Usually just a quick local Save action away & asking them to refresh.
If anything, you might even argue that the people who have a strong LAMP/whatever background are exactly the target customer for Showoff -- they're the only ones who can read Option 1 and groan in disgust at doing all that just to try out a pending feature/fix.
The value prop isn't merely "Now You Can Share With One Click" (and not just because there is no clicking involved) ;). It's that and much more.
Re: Showoff
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need to have some server listening on your local machine at whatever port you are creating the tunnel for. If you just wanted to test it out you could start something like "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" and then "show 8000", which will serve files from your local machine at your showoff url (I might recommend running the server in an empty directory).
Right you are; I did that and was able to see a bunch of stuff I'd not want to share over the web. :) Sheesh. Ruby runs over 3000, if you're not running the ruby server on 3000 there's not going to be anything listening. Facepalm.
A pedantic correction: Rails runs its server on port 3000 by default; Ruby is the language Rails was written in.
Re: Showoff
#47I love this idea, and the pricing seems spot-on. However, it's not obvious if this is Ruby-only or not? I don't use Ruby, so that's kind of a big deal.
I had the same question as we do mostly PHP; I'm guessing it just uses Ruby as the host software. I installed the Gem and was able to acquire a URL but kept getting an error: An error has occurred: {"stack":"Error: socket hang up\n at Socket. (http.js:1271:45)\n at Socket.emit (events.js:64:17)\n at Array.0 (net.js:825:12)\n at EventEmitter._tickCallback (node.js:126:26)","message":"socket hang up"}
Instead of giving this error, there needs to be a message that explicitly tells the user what's wrong. Something like:
"Woops, you said your server was running on port . Is it?"
Re: Showoff
#48If you have a public facing server then this can be had for free:
ssh -nNT -R 8080:localhost:3000 myserver.com
Re: Showoff
#49I am not picky about design. But please change the colors. There is not enough contrast. I am really making an effort to read just because everybody says it is worth it.
Re: Showoff
#50If you have a public facing server then this can be had for free: ssh -nNT -R 8080:localhost:3000 myserver.com Et voilà, myserver.com:8080 now points to localhost:3000.
Do you accept upvotes as currency? I was thinking that ssh should be able to do this.