Show HN: My first weekend project

3 points

15 years ago

Okay, first thing, I should warn you that my project isn't an awesome tech demo that I've spent many weekends building and polishing. No, my project 1) took less than 48 hours and, 2) while I'm proud of it, it's definitely not technically impressive. It's possible that it's something only a mother could love. Hopefully this convinces you that anyone can build a semi-useful website.

URL: http://how-many-calories-are-in.com/

The idea was to create a site providing useful information and then the second phase of the plan is to eke out some passive income from advertising. I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to get the website in front of people, though. Other than sharing it with you fine folks and my whopping 35 twitter followers, I'm thinking maybe I'll email popular food and nutrition blogs and see if I can smooth-talk them into giving the site a shout out. If you have any advice/ideas for generating revenue/page views, let me know.

No fancy framework or anything. It's just a static HTML site that I generated from a dataset available from data.gov. The search box is still a little wonky because not all of the pages have been indexed. It was my first stab at using Ruby for something other than solving Project Euler problems, so the scripts I wrote to generate it (and the StackOverflow questions I had to ask) are embarrassing, but the scripts are provided for your amusement at https://github.com/robertseaton/how-many-calories-are-in.com/ and the StackOverflow questions are now a matter of public record. In hindsight, I should have used some type of templating system to separate the code and data, but I figure: if it works, it works. In the future, though: some kind of templating system, definitely. Maybe I'll refactor if I decide to add more to the site.

I probably spent about half the weekend writing the dinky scripts to output the site and the other half working on the site's design in an attempt to get it looking like a site that you might trust in giving you correct nutrition information. This is like my second attempt at designing a website. I had no idea what I was doing. I just tweaked the CSS until I found something that looked less horrible.

Any feedback is welcome.

P.S. If you're looking for a passionate programmer with C/systems experience and a will to learn for an entry-level programming position or internship (ideally in the Chicago-land area, but we can work something out), my contact info is in my profile.

6 comments