

Show HN: Sandstorm-powered “Try a demo” on Etherpad front page - paulproteus
http://etherpad.org/

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ScottWhigham
I like Etherpad but unless you give us a reason for posting this here that is
HN-related, it should be flagged.

~~~
paulproteus
Hi Scott!

I think this is interesting for two reasons:

1\. Open source web apps often struggle to maintain a "Try it" server. The
interesting thing here is that Sandstorm (through our package ecosystem and
demo server) makes that easy for any open source web app, and this is an
example of that.

2\. Since I wrote the code that powers that link, I thought it would be a
great thing to "Show HN", per
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)
"Show HN is a way to share something that you've made on Hacker News."

~~~
ScottWhigham
That's better - thank you. We (the community) just saw this as "Is it spam?"

Sorry - I thought you were a new account. I'm using the chrome extension
"Hacker News Enhancement Suite" and it highlights yours in a very-similar-
color-to-newbie-color.

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dwrensha
Groove Basin also has one of these buttons!

[http://groovebasin.com/](http://groovebasin.com/)

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dang
Did you make this? Show HN is for showing your own work.

Edit: yup. See below.

~~~
paulproteus
Thanks for taking an interest!

I personally wrote the code behind Sandstorm's "appdemo" feature, which is
what the "Try it now" button links to, from the Etherpad front page. Etherpad
itself is not written by me; it's written by many other great people.

See e.g. [https://github.com/sandstorm-
io/sandstorm/commits?author=pau...](https://github.com/sandstorm-
io/sandstorm/commits?author=paulproteus&page=2)

I also wrote this blog post about the feature:
[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-02-06-app-
demo.html](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-02-06-app-demo.html)

Happy to answer other questions if you have them!

~~~
dang
Ok, great! We put "Show HN" back in the title. We also added "Sandstorm-
powered" in an attempt to make it more explanatory.

~~~
paulproteus
Thanks so much, dang!

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swayvil
It's like irc. Irc with more formatting.

Can I insert pictures?

woo, a time slider. nice.

