

Show HN: My first weekend project - adbge

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 <i>anyone</i> can build a semi-useful website.<p>URL: http://how-many-calories-are-in.com/<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Any feedback is welcome.<p>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.
======
stfu
A very nice project. I would suggest putting there some alphabet on top of it
so it is easier to navigate to a letter somewhat a bit more down in the
alphabet. I especially welcome your honesty about your data source. Kinda rare
to see someone around here being so open about their resources.

~~~
adbge
Great idea about the clickable alphabet. I hadn't considered that.

------
leejw00t354
I think this kind of thing would be great as an HTML5 web app. A user could
load up the site and see a logo and a search box. They type in the food and
with a smooth and well designed UI can see all the information they need. No
apps needed and it would work on any mobile/tablet. This is the kind of thing
I'd like to be able to access when I'm not at home, for example when I'm
buying food or eatting out.

~~~
adbge
Yeah, a mobile version of the site is something I'm considering as a future
weekend project.

------
adbge
Clickable links:

<http://how-many-calories-are-in.com/> [https://github.com/robertseaton/how-
many-calories-are-in.com...](https://github.com/robertseaton/how-many-
calories-are-in.com/)

------
ShawnJG
not bad for a 48 hour build. A little attention to formatting and graphical
aesthetics and I can see your site easily be used by some blogger. the most
important thing you've already done, you major site valuable. It's a quick and
easy way to look up caloric information about very popular foods. you make
something people want it easy for the layman to understand and use. He
followed the first rule of getting something to market fast now all you have
to do is make incremental improvements based on user feedback.

