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How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

7bks.com

61–70 of 79 posts

Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#63
Very nice. I'm impressed with turning that out in four weeks based on starting with no programming/html knowledge. As far as the CSS goes, one thing that helped me was using one of the many CSS frameworks out there. You might try that if you run into more issues going forward. I'm using blueprint for now, but there are several out there to choose from.

Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#66

Update - the site just fell over :( I've activated billing in app engine but no idea how long it takes to come online. Really sorry guys - I assumed the free quotes would see me through! Hopefully it comes back soon. edit - looks like the billing just kicked in... Phew. Sorry about that! looks like I caught it just about in time. If you saw the 404 page my apologies. I've loaded it up with credits so it should stay u…

AppEngine claims to provide enough free bandwidth for ~5 million pageviews/month. Did you hit that limit from just this HN post?

Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#67
So I notice that you are taking images off amazon's API and are reposting the covers... how are you getting away with this. I had a similar idea that i half implemented and had to abandon because amazon's API policy is very specific about hosting and grabbing their images from their API. They also supposedly don't want you to cash almost any of their information ...

Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#68
post #67

So I notice that you are taking images off amazon's API and are reposting the covers... how are you getting away with this. I had a similar idea that i half implemented and had to abandon because amazon's API policy is very specific about hosting and grabbing their images from their API. They also supposedly don't want you to cash almost any of their information ...

Umm - I don't use any book images on my site so I'm not sure if perhaps you're confused with another of the sites listed here?

Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#69

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 oth…

Thank you very much for taking a look. Very reassuring to know I didn't mess anything up too bad :)

Re: How I built 7books in under 4 weeks

#70

Update - the site just fell over :( I've activated billing in app engine but no idea how long it takes to come online. Really sorry guys - I assumed the free quotes would see me through! Hopefully it comes back soon. edit - looks like the billing just kicked in... Phew. Sorry about that! looks like I caught it just about in time. If you saw the 404 page my apologies. I've loaded it up with credits so it should stay u…

AppEngine claims to provide enough free bandwidth for ~5 million pageviews/month. Did you hit that limit from just this HN post?

I'm really new to this so not really sure. When you enable billing your free limits increase (weird I know) and I don't think I've actually incurred any costs as a result. I don't really know how well optimised my site is so it may be that it could scale up to those numbers if the back end was better? That said, all the limits are daily on app engine so maybe it was just that the spike was big enough to bust my daily limits?
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