161–170 of 222 posts
Wow that's brilliant. I'm definetley a potential paying customer. That's cheaper than spinning up an Amazon EC2 micro instance to develop on at $5 a month. I'm not a big fan of dark gray background with darker gray text though.
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Thanks for sharing. Here is some honest critique for you: It's about more than marketing. Where they are blowing you guys away is usability -- partly in the product itself, but more on the website. In less than 100 words I know: a) exactly what showoff does, and b) exactly how to get it up and running. Compare that to your Quick Start guide: https://pagekite.net/support/quickstart/ I mean, my eyes just glaze over whe…
Usability and quickstarts/documentation ARE marketing.
Our problem is we have a highly technical, generic tool and we've found it really hard to write docs that are easy to understand and a product description that resonates with people.
It's quite eye-opening to see how someone with a relatively small subset of our features can completely wow everyone by very clearly presenting just one use-case. Simplicity really seems to be key, at least to getting this kind of attention.
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It's a bit like saying: if you have a private server you can use: git push blah instead of using DropBox. (This doesn not invalidate your point; far from it, I'm just saying that because it's somewhat trivial for us geek doesn't mean it's not something that other folks would pay for.
What non-technical person runs a server on their laptop?
Servers are awesome. :-)
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Thanks for sharing. Here is some honest critique for you: It's about more than marketing. Where they are blowing you guys away is usability -- partly in the product itself, but more on the website. In less than 100 words I know: a) exactly what showoff does, and b) exactly how to get it up and running. Compare that to your Quick Start guide: https://pagekite.net/support/quickstart/ I mean, my eyes just glaze over whe…
Thanks for the feedback! We are working on all of these things - we've been iterating from 'geeks only' to 'polished product' and just aren't all the way there yet.
I think the http://browserling.com/ guys are working on a solution where you can proxy your local web server over an SSH tunnel for previewing your website in multiple browsers without deploying it.
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Err... what? If you're even a half-serious developer, you're going to have a static IP or something like dyndns. You're also going to have your own domain, VPN, and port forwarding. Setting this up on your own network is trivial. You can use it no matter where you are, so long as you have internet. Just buy a cheapo router that supports DD-WRT, set up dyndns, and you're good to go. Seriously. I get it that some peopl…
>If you're even a half-serious developer, you're going to have a static IP or something like dyndns. You're also going to have your own domain, VPN, and port forwarding. Setting this up on your own network is trivial. You can use it no matter where you are, so long as you have internet. Just buy a cheapo router that supports DD-WRT, set up dyndns, and you're good to go. Um, Assume none of the above - and instead assu…
On top of that, you're using your own domain, which is more professional in my humble opinion. It's lappie.yourdomain.com and not lappie.theirdomain.com ... oh yeah, and it's free. Just get one of your nerd friends to set it up. Once it's up, it'll run forever.
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Oh but I detect that you care. Well, the difference between this and an obscure open source project buried on git hub is for a starter to at least have a web-site at localtunnel.com!
I care about my work and it being used and contributed to if people are interested in it. I don't care about money, which is why it's open source and run as a free service. My code is MIT and I would love it if people took my code and made a pay-for service like this with it... but instead, they (to be fair, probably unknowingly) duplicate effort and obscure my work. If a fancy website is all I need, I guess that's w…
To be fair, the "fancy website" is a byproduct of designers who like to make stuff look good, and the rest of Showoff's team caring very much about not just making stuff that works (of which they make a lot, much of which is hidden away in obscurity), but about making it easy for people to use who wouldn't perhaps take on the task themselves—and I don't think there is anything at all wrong with that.
However, I don't think it is fair to imply creating this tool (and its website) was a product of caring about money, or duplicating and obscuring your (or anyone else's) efforts. It is like many other ideas out there that came from a real need, hacking it together, and then asking if people might find it useful enough to pay for it. That's not a reason to disparage or diminish a job well done.
In the end, it looks like Showoff's also brought attention to your project, pagekite, and plenty of other ways people have shared to do the same thing. Today was the first time I'd heard of localtunnel, but I've done this same bit of showing off localhost before for clients and coworkers on my own--and it's a bit like splitting hairs to call it duplication. Hackers hack. It's what we do. I definitely like open sourcing when it makes sense. But I also like to eat and have a roof over my head. Open source does not hold a monopoly on good intentions.
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Err... what? If you're even a half-serious developer, you're going to have a static IP or something like dyndns. You're also going to have your own domain, VPN, and port forwarding. Setting this up on your own network is trivial. You can use it no matter where you are, so long as you have internet. Just buy a cheapo router that supports DD-WRT, set up dyndns, and you're good to go. Seriously. I get it that some peopl…
>If you're even a half-serious developer, you're going to have a static IP or something like dyndns. You're also going to have your own domain, VPN, and port forwarding. Setting this up on your own network is trivial. You can use it no matter where you are, so long as you have internet. Just buy a cheapo router that supports DD-WRT, set up dyndns, and you're good to go. Um, Assume none of the above - and instead assu…
But that's just me.
Why would i use this over a VPS? A VPS is a similar price and has similar functionality, but doesn't pose a security risk to my home workstation and comes with a slew of other benefits. The tech looks reasonably cool, but what is the use case? EDIT: Your site also makes it sound like it is HTTP(S) only. If it's not, you might want to clarify that.