
How I built 7books in under 4 weeks - revorad
http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001
======
nopal
Thank you, thank you for creating a product blog whose header links back to
the actual product page.

It seems like every other product blog that I visit is intentionally keeping
me from being able to navigate to the actual product!

~~~
topcat31
I completely agree - annoying as hell when you click the logo and you just
stay on the blog. Joined up thinking people!

Of course it helps that I built it all from scratch so integrating the blog
was pretty easy :)

------
kyro
Jesus, 4 weeks? That's awesome. I've been learning on and off for a few years
now, and have recently buckled down to finally get something done. What are
some lessons you learned for building your next project? Also, it seems like
you've got a good eye for design. With a bit more practice and experience, you
could likely make some great looking sites. It certainly looks a lot better
than sites I've seen made by more seasoned coders.

~~~
topcat31
Kyro, I'm planning a follow up "lessons learned" post already (#1 - enable
billing on app engine 'just in case'!!).

Thanks a lot for your feedback :)

------
almost
First thoughts: yeah yeah 4 weeks isn't _that_ impressive. But then... that
included learning to program from scratch?!? Wow.

~~~
topcat31
Thanks almost :) I hope the story is inspirational but also, really anyone can
do it with a little work. I hope I inspire people to follow suit and code
their dreams

------
topcat31
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'll try
and keep an eye on it though.

Ok - right off to trawl through the comments and responses and reply!

Thank you all :)

~~~
peripitea
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 other things way before you start optimizing
the bandwidth.

~~~
topcat31
Thank you very much for taking a look. Very reassuring to know I didn't mess
anything up too bad :)

------
topcat31
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 up now

~~~
JonnieCache
welcome to the world of running public facing internet services. and early
onset heart disease.

~~~
topcat31
Heh - indeed :)

------
zachster
This is really great. I love the concept and simplicity.

Here are some suggestions:

1\. Use the Amazon API to autosuggest book titles and author names.

2\. Normalize the lists. That is, count up which books are recommended the
most and use those statistics to recommend books.

3\. List similar lists on each list :) Lists that list the same books might be
related. If they list two or more of the same books, they're probably related.

But even if you don't change a thing, it's still a great little project!

~~~
topcat31
Thanks Zachster - some of those are definitely on my road map. I wanted to
launch early though so as soon as I was partially happy with it I set it live.
I can add those features later.

The ajax thing is definitely a strong priority - but I need to learn how to do
ajax first and I think it's pretty hard...!

~~~
ericlavigne
I highly recommend this free, online book for learning more about jQuery.

<http://jqfundamentals.com/>

(AJAX is chapter 7)

------
neilkod
As someone who within the last two weeks picked up app engine and created an
MVP of my own <http://www.pubcontweets.com>, I can not only relate to your
story but also applaud you for sharing the it as well as your code. Thanks.

~~~
raghus
Stupid question: what does MVP stand for here?

~~~
kalid
Minimum Viable Product (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product>)

------
Jabbles
How much did that domain name cost?

These are similar, they may help inspire you for features:
<http://www.goodreads.com/> <http://www.shelfari.com/>

Keep it up!

~~~
kmort
The domain may well have been unregistered.

As HN'er nerfhammer noted: 1 digit + 3 letters = 83.8% availability.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1698035>

~~~
Jabbles
I thought they were all gone!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1698035>

------
tommusic
Great job learning a language (and an infrastructure) with such speed!

I've been building something with a similar aim on and off for a long time
now, and it's neat to see in the comments that there are at least three others
already out there.

I wonder if there is something that will lead to more widespread
awareness/adoption of sites like these. Or are we better off trying to pick a
target market smaller than [all book readers]?

Some good food for thought as I try and finally finish my own entrant into the
space.

~~~
topcat31
Frankly I have no idea :)

Having only just launched I don't know what the market looks like. I strongly
suspect that the site will end up gravitating towards one kind of user. But
who knows! 22books.com (mentioned below) gets used by quite a lot of school
teachers so there are plenty of niches out there.

Let me know how you get on - happy to share thoughts :)

------
javery
This is awesome - I built a site called 22books a couple years ago as a way to
learn Ruby... it took me a little longer than 4 weeks but I think I launched
with more functionality.

I haven't done much with the site but it actually ended up getting used by
teachers and librarians so I would feel bad ever shutting it down.

<http://22books.com>

~~~
topcat31
Hey mate - we spoke on email a few weeks ago! I was gonna drop you a line
about the site but things have been a bit manic recently. I think I'm going in
a slightly different direction to you so hopefully you don't mind too much
that our sites are similar. I'm going to look at exploring the community angle
in the coming months so hopefully we won't tread on each others toes too much.

~~~
Dramatize
I'm going to create a site called 1book.com where you post your top favourite
book :)

------
zzzmarcus
I built a similar site - <http://www.instabrary.com> awhile back which is
pretty much the exact same idea. It's running now but since I moved to Heroku
you can't register. I should look into that.

The Rails source is here: <https://github.com/marcus/Instabrary>

~~~
topcat31
Ooh nice site - I tried googling around to see if there were any other sites
that did it but didn't find your site before I built mine. I'll definitely
take a poke around and see what I can learn though :)

------
dp7531
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.

~~~
topcat31
I have no idea what a CSS framework is but I'll put it on my todo list to find
out! Thanks :)

~~~
dp7531
no problem. What you have now looks good, so you may not need it unless/until
you do a redesign.

They basically have a set of predefined CSS classes for layouts to give you a
starting point. Blueprint and some of the others also have a default set of
styles predefined, and you can find several examples of people who have added
to them. It basically gave me a good starting point instead of having to hack
up my own CSS from the start.

They also claim to help resolve several of the CSS differences between
browsers, but I haven't tested that first hand yet.

------
MisterWebz
Very impressive. I've been learning Python for almost a whole year and I
haven't even got one completely functional app. I've got tons of unfinished
ones though.

~~~
blhack
FINISH THEM! Ask for help if you need it!

I started doing "web stuff" about 3 years ago and have learned _sooo_ much
just by _forcing_ myself to do it.

It's so funny to me to see how much I've changed, I came across one of the
first ever "apps" that I made a few days ago. It was a DVD cataloger that I
made my Dad for his birthday (He glanced at it, went "huh", then bought some
commercial version of the same thing...humph) and it was kindof cool to look
over the shoulder of Ryan from 3 years ago to see what he was doing.

What's keeping you from finishing these things?

~~~
MisterWebz
When in the middle of a project, i suddenly get a "better" idea and abandon
the current project to work on the better one.

~~~
blhack
Is it that the idea is better, or is it that you hit a wall in your
programming?

(This has been my excuse to myself before)

~~~
MisterWebz
Either it's that or the core of the website was finished, but tons of small
things needed to be fixed, which is a real pain in the ass to do. And
sometimes I do feel like I have a better idea and working on the current
project would be a waste of time.

Took me a while to realize that sometimes the real reason I canceled my
projects were because of laziness.

------
milkinm
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 ...

~~~
topcat31
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?

------
tlack
to go from not knowing how to make a <form> to doing all of this in 4 weeks is
majorly impressive. and the site has a really nice, unique look and feel. good
work!

~~~
topcat31
thanks :)

------
jessor
> _I'd strongly recommend anyone starting out developing something to find
> some kind of mentor. I wish I'd had someone I could have asked for help but
> in my case..._

So is there already a hn spreadsheet up somewhere where one could find a, say,
rails mentor? :)

~~~
techiferous
<http://www.railsmentors.org/>

~~~
jessor
Awesome! Thanks.

------
vidar
Good for you, it always warms my heart to see someone taking these first
steps. Try to notice your own reactions, its good to be reminded of when you
yourself were a novice.

~~~
topcat31
Thanks vidar - I'm blown away by all the positive feedback :)

It's been a fun few weeks, I hope my post encourages others to follow in my
steps!

------
blntechie
Suggestions:

1) I'm not sure whether you're using Amazon referral links. You can show the
book cover next to the title linking it to the amazon using the associate tag.
It will fetch you some decent money I believe if someone buys the books using
the links. Have never used but read about this in Stackoverflow.

2) You can use amazon.com/books instead of amazon.com in the Stuck? message
link when adding a new book.

Great work!!

------
phlcastro
I had to subscribe myself just to say you rock man! Great idea, amazing
history and huge willpower! Congrats

------
dmel
Did you learn Python first?

or did you learn it as your learned google's app engine?

~~~
topcat31
Learned it as I went along. I was completely new to both app engine and python
when I started. The beginners guide on app engine (link in blog post) guides
you through everything you need really

------
SanjayUttam
Great job taking into account you learned along the way...but most of all,
kudos for sticking with it. Sometimes, that is the most difficult part.

Love the simplicity of the site, as well. Good luck.

------
joubert
Kudos for posting the source code as well.

------
zhyder
Feature request: show book cover art.

~~~
steamer25
Small Tip: \--Have a friendlier URL for users. I.e., If I want to share my
list with someone offline, I'd prefer to say, "Hey checkout
7bks.com/user/steamer25" rather than "7bks.com/user/1094004".

~~~
topcat31
Yep - I know I should do that. Brings with it a few issues but I'll try and
migrate over at some point - same with blog posts, I'd love to use slugs
rather than numbers.

------
Cafesolo
Impressive - good work!

I love the blog theme. Is that a WordPress blog? What's the theme's name?

~~~
robgough
If you read the article you'll see he mentioned that he wrote the blog
software too... so no, it's not wordpress.

~~~
Cafesolo
Oh, thanks. I missed that.

------
whatrocks
Did you purposely use orange lines to appeal to this community?

It worked.

------
kingkao
It would be nice if you can pull in some images from amazon of book covers.

~~~
topcat31
Using ajax with either the amazon or google books api is definitely on my
roadmap. I don't (yet!) know how to code ajax though. Also - i'm unconvinced
about book covers. Most book covers are actually pretty uninteresting so I'm
not a big fan of them. Still, I definitely want to make certain things more
visual.

------
johnconroy
Hell of a good job. Learning to code & build a web app from scratch in 4 weeks
is mighty impressive.

~~~
topcat31
Thank you sir :)

