As for the form, you should take a look at http://www.jotform.com , (not affiliate with them, just a happy customer) , they are less expensive and have a 50 % yearly discount during this period, that could be a place to start to bring your spending down
How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business
#12I learnt to code when I set up almost exactly the same business ten years ago - http://www.thebigspace.co.uk I built it in PHP and MySQL and there was no MVC for me. It was a mess. It's been completely rewritten at least three times, and is due another rewrite. For about the first five of those years, the hosting cost £10 per year, and £2.50 for the domain name. I believe the site now uses a small part of a Linode $2…
Neato
How do the students estimate the number of items?
Back when I was a student (we used to chase geese to get feathers to make pens in those days) my most difficult to manage possessions were books. Several hundred of them.
Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business
#13I learnt to code when I set up almost exactly the same business ten years ago - http://www.thebigspace.co.uk I built it in PHP and MySQL and there was no MVC for me. It was a mess. It's been completely rewritten at least three times, and is due another rewrite. For about the first five of those years, the hosting cost £10 per year, and £2.50 for the domain name. I believe the site now uses a small part of a Linode $2…
Neato How do the students estimate the number of items? Back when I was a student (we used to chase geese to get feathers to make pens in those days) my most difficult to manage possessions were books. Several hundred of them.
They just order what they reckon and are usually 10-15% under what they thought. We charged for what we actually stored so it worked out fine.
Books and clothes are now the core of the business. When we started people all had hifis, 14" TVs, VCRs/DVD players, desktop computers, CRT monitors, boxes of CDs and DVDs - all that has gone now. And books will probably be largely gone in five years.
Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neato How do the students estimate the number of items? Back when I was a student (we used to chase geese to get feathers to make pens in those days) my most difficult to manage possessions were books. Several hundred of them.
They just order what they reckon and are usually 10-15% under what they thought. We charged for what we actually stored so it worked out fine. Books and clothes are now the core of the business. When we started people all had hifis, 14" TVs, VCRs/DVD players, desktop computers, CRT monitors, boxes of CDs and DVDs - all that has gone now. And books will probably be largely gone in five years.
Sorry, the Web form only allows 15 items max. Do books count as a single item or lots of items?
Note: I teach maths to teenagers. This business could form a nice interesting project for them, one that they could actually understand the logic of. I live at least 5 degrees of latitude below Dundee!
Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
They just order what they reckon and are usually 10-15% under what they thought. We charged for what we actually stored so it worked out fine. Books and clothes are now the core of the business. When we started people all had hifis, 14" TVs, VCRs/DVD players, desktop computers, CRT monitors, boxes of CDs and DVDs - all that has gone now. And books will probably be largely gone in five years.
Sorry, the Web form only allows 15 items max. Do books count as a single item or lots of items? Note: I teach maths to teenagers. This business could form a nice interesting project for them, one that they could actually understand the logic of. I live at least 5 degrees of latitude below Dundee!
Books go in a box. Choose the size of box to accomodate the books. Don't do what everyone does and put all the heavy books in one box and all the bedding in the remaining five.
Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business
#16I do think Wordpress, big hairy pile of PHP that it is, is actually a much better way to learn to code than CodeAcademy or equivalent. In fact, it's because working with WP involves so much hacking and kludges that it's such a good way to learn.
CodeAcademy seems to follow the Dijkstra school of CS teaching... start people off with the fundamental principles. Sounds like the logical way to learn, but maybe it's not the most effective.
There seems to be a gulf between "I know how for loops and functions work" and "I know how to use HTML, CSS, PHP and an FTP account to get a website working". People also complain that CodeAcademy spoonfeeds you too much - those of us who had to claw our coding knowledge out of shitty w3schools and tizag tutorials might actually have been more fortunate.
That's why I like Wordpress, or similar platforms. I've known a few people who accidentally taught themselves to code this way: they install Wordpress, then install a theme, then decide they want to tweak the theme and end up accidentally learning HTML and CSS. Then they start installing plugins, decide they want to tweak the plugins and accidentally learn Javascript and PHP.
Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business
#17I do think Wordpress, big hairy pile of PHP that it is, is actually a much better way to learn to code than CodeAcademy or equivalent. In fact, it's because working with WP involves so much hacking and kludges that it's such a good way to learn. CodeAcademy seems to follow the Dijkstra school of CS teaching... start people off with the fundamental principles. Sounds like the logical way to learn, but maybe it's not t…
I don't think the two ways are mutually exclusive... in fact I'd say both are needed. I started out trying to throw up a quick website in Wordpress and Drupal, and found out I couldn't set it up the way I liked. So I taught myself to code with resources including CodeAcademy. Now I can build a site pretty much from scratch, hosted on my own server or GAE.
Without my struggles with CMS or frameworks, I wouldn't have known what to code. But without the likes of Udacity and CA, I wouldn't have known how to code it. But, I can now write a functioning webapp after half a year, while working full time. I doubt that would have happened with just books/tutorials or even a university course.
For what it is, these are great learning tools. I can't fault them for not being designed to make you into a full stack developer, yet.
Though I still couldn't have done it without StackOverflow :)
Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business
#18There are definitely cheaper ways to get SSL. The simplest might be a CloudFlare Pro account, since you won't have to migrate to a different host. (It wasn't clear how much of the $99 WPE charge was hosting and how much was an SSL surcharge. It's my impression that these surcharges vary quite a bit.)
Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, the Web form only allows 15 items max. Do books count as a single item or lots of items? Note: I teach maths to teenagers. This business could form a nice interesting project for them, one that they could actually understand the logic of. I live at least 5 degrees of latitude below Dundee!
Books go in a box. Choose the size of box to accomodate the books. Don't do what everyone does and put all the heavy books in one box and all the bedding in the remaining five.
Even better: here is a box. How many 'average' library books can you fit into it.
Seriously, put a 'functional skills maths ideas' page up there and you'll get tonnes of teachers linking to the page.
Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business
#20I do think Wordpress, big hairy pile of PHP that it is, is actually a much better way to learn to code than CodeAcademy or equivalent. In fact, it's because working with WP involves so much hacking and kludges that it's such a good way to learn. CodeAcademy seems to follow the Dijkstra school of CS teaching... start people off with the fundamental principles. Sounds like the logical way to learn, but maybe it's not t…
I don't think the two ways are mutually exclusive... in fact I'd say both are needed. I started out trying to throw up a quick website in Wordpress and Drupal, and found out I couldn't set it up the way I liked. So I taught myself to code with resources including CodeAcademy. Now I can build a site pretty much from scratch, hosted on my own server or GAE. Without my struggles with CMS or frameworks, I wouldn't have k…
I could not agree with you more.
I think it is absolutely crucial that you have a real world project to work on - something that makes you actually write some code and solve some problems in a production environment. That being said, supplemental education that focuses on fundamentals can drastically speed up the learning process.
It's almost like practicing a sport. There are drills you need to run in order to improve specific skills, but without taking those skills and applying them in a real game situation you never actually connect all the dots that lead to self improvement. On the flip side, its not enough to just play games - sometimes it helps to go the batting cages and practice on a specific skill set. I treat my learning the same way.