

Show HN: My first webapp. Build with rails, backbonejs and lots of love. - muellerwolfram
http://www.themescroller.com

======
muellerwolfram
A couple of month ago, after finishing (almost) Standfords Saas-class
(<https://www.coursera.org/course/saas>), i decided it was time for my first
webapp.

A directory for wordpress themes sounded like a small enough project to start
learning everything there is to know about running a webapp. What i learned
the last 2 month feels more valuable then 3 years of college. The backend runs
on rails, the frontend is done with backbonejs and i'm using mongolab.com as
my database-(service).

the skills that i learned so far are mostly technical, now i need to figure
out how to get the word out... any pointers on how to do that are very
welcome.

I thought i start here since i love how much you help fellow hackers out. any
feedback on the app would be highly appretiated.

~~~
koopajah
It's pretty neat, I like the ability to view a lot of themes at once juste
scrolling. One minor thing : when using the filter part, if I tick for example
"business" then untick it maybe it should come back to "all" by default
instead of showing a blank page?

How do you manage the color detection, do you tag it yourself? For Orange,
there's one theme that should not be here : the "screen" one but as the theme
is based on pictures "wallpaper" changing maybe one of them has orange in it?

~~~
muellerwolfram
oh thanks, good call with the unticking thing. i didn't even notice that.

the colors are tagged by a script. i wrote a scraper for all of these
marketplaces, which collects all the data, takes a screenshot, (tries) to
guess the main color and uploads everything... so yeah, if there is a huge
example picture with the color orange, my script thinks orange is part of the
theme. maybe i can deactivate all images for the color guessing part. i have
to figure that out. but thanks for the feedback, really appretiate that!

------
asolove
This is a great first app. I assume you are looking for ideas of things to
think about and work on next, otherwise I wouldn't criticize. So here are a
few ideas:

\- Right now you have to click directly on the checkboxes and radio buttons,
which are small targets. There is an easy way to let users click on the text
next to the checkbox, and a padded area around it a few pixels, which will
make them much easier to use.

\- You are mostly using the browser-default typography. Most web applications
look better with sans-serif fonts, like the ones you see in any menu on a
desktop application.

\- The url is currently a bit ugly for the default case, with lots of
?blah=all. Can you figure out a way to remove those and just assume "all" as
the default if it isn't in the url?

\- The filter tab currently has what I would technically describe as "a big
jumble of options". Everything looks the same and is the same size, as if you
expect all of the options to be equally used and to have the same
relationship. Can you think of a way to provide more understandable structure,
by making some of the options (the more useful ones) stand out more, and
others be out of the way. Or can you find some relationship between the
different options that can be expressed visually?

\- "Only free themes?" All, Yes, No. Are "all" and "no" the same? Perhaps you
mean: All, Free, Paid?

Have fun! I know how exciting a time it is tuning your first big thing. Good
luck.

~~~
muellerwolfram
wow lots of great advice. thanks for the feedback, especially the long-url-
thing blew my mind...it's so obvious..but i never thought of it!

~~~
asolove
This is a great first project, and I wish you luck. I have a decent amount of
experience with rails and backbone, feel free to email me if you ever have
questions or want code reviewed: asolove@gmail.com

------
benelsen
Very nice. Here’s just a small thing I’d change: You update the url using
backbones router.navigate, right? If you pass {replace: true} in the options
object, the browser won’t create a new entry in the history as it does right
now but still update the URL.
<http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Router-navigate>

~~~
muellerwolfram
yes, exactly, that's how i do it. maybe i'm missing something, but why do you
suggest not making an entry in the history?

~~~
burriko
The user is scrolling one long page, not navigating between 'pages'. Having
entries inserted into the history while scrolling seems very counter-intuitive
to me.

~~~
muellerwolfram
mh yes that makes sense.

i think the reason why i did this, was because initially the preview und
market links didn't open in a new window. but you're right, if the user is
staying on one page, he doesnt need a 'back' functionality.

thanks for the feedback, i already changed it, going to push it later...

------
corentino
I got a question and a feedback : 1/ how do you make money ? Do you get a
commission for each theme you sell

2/ It would be great if you had some info about the theme, for example, when
I'm looking for a wordpress theme, I want to make sure its design is
responsive. You should add some theme info to your app !

Great job anyway ;)

~~~
muellerwolfram
1) yes, through affiliate links. most marketplaces give you commission on
sales.

2) yes better filters/ more infos is on the roadmap. getting data of ~4000
themes is not a task i want to do by hand. and the infos i get by scraping the
sites is limited. but as someone said before, the user doesn't care about how
its done, the user cares about how it works. so i'm going to think about that.
maybe i let mechanical turks look for all that data.

but for now: there is a filter for responsive themes. its the layout->
responsive layout filter. if you select that, you will get all the themes
where i definitly knew that they are responsive.

~~~
corentino
Thanks !

Good luck with the themes info retreival :)

------
DevAccount
Congratulations on releasing your first app.

To get the word out; posting here is a good start. Post on Reddit too. Also,
you could try sending a Press Release type email to relevant blogs - they
might blog about your app.

Think about SEO and how your site ranks in a Google Search for instance.

~~~
muellerwolfram
thanks.

yeah seo is a hard one, since the app is basically just images...

~~~
olsn
How about using alt- and title-tags for those images?

~~~
muellerwolfram
right, meta tags are also missing at the moment. but generally speaking...its
a javascript app, with dynamic content (filters) and only images... the
googlebot is not going to apply filters. or maybe he is, i don't know.

~~~
allardschip
The google bot won't touch any javascript, it will just follow links. You can
consider a link to a directory to the different themes.

~~~
facorreia
Googling "googlebot execute javascript" indicates otherwise.

~~~
allardschip
I stand corrected. they use Javascript in a headless browser to generate the
site previews. Detailed information on how Javascript is interpreted to index
sites is hard to find. I would not count on Javascript to instruct Google Bot
what to index.

------
danielna
The more I experience it, the more I think the "pinterest-style" layout is
absolutely the best way to consume visuals. Great idea and great execution! I
would definitely use this.

From the perspective of a dev who occasionally buys from Themeforest, I find a
few of the pieces of default TF metadata really important: price, browser
support and # of sales (in decreasing order of importance). Don't know how
accessible that info is via the API, but it'd be great to access that info
without many (or any) clicks.

------
chimi
This is a very nice first web app. Congratulations, you've done fine work.

I will offer one UI design tip. The radio button for All and check boxes for
yes/no, etc under the filters tab is not how these ui elements are typically
used. Checking Yes and No _is_ all, so there is no need for the All option,
just have all the check boxes checked by default and allow the user to uncheck
the ones they don't want to see.

------
jwblackwell
Nice idea, browsing through Themeforest is a bit of a painful, multi tab
experience most of the time.

How about adding a text search as well? I regularly search for stuff like
"admin" or "app" to narrow the search.

------
blahbap
It's a very nice app, but it does not say anywhere that these are Wordpress
themes - is that obvious to everyone?

~~~
bti
Wasn't to me until reading your comment.

------
stuffihavemade
I'd dial back on the shadows behind the themes. It makes the pictures look
like they're glowing.

------
gaius
Outside of HN, no-one cares what it is written in, only what it does.

~~~
jschuur
...and yet this was posted to HN.

~~~
zoidb
I assume he was giving advice for when he advertises it other sites other than
HN

~~~
gaius
That is correct.

