
Instead of a card, make your valentine a website - colevscode
http://valentine.brace.io
======
hawkharris
I have a tradition of making my girlfriend a Web app every Valentine's Day and
other holidays. She's a GAS analyst, so I try to incorporate location - based
features.

This year I got her three locked wooden boxes with numbers written on them.
The numbers represent the miles she has to travel to unlock them using a
companion app called MapStreak (www.mapstreak.com).

Making apps for people close to you is a great way to explore new technology
without all the pressures or time commitment of starting a full - fledged side
project.

~~~
iends
You're setting the bar way too high.

------
penguindev
I made my wife a blog / marketing page for her business a few weeks ago as her
'early' valentines day present. The domain name was $13 or so, and using s3
(it's a static generated site) is basically free for how small it is. I
decided not to pay 0.50/month for route53 apex support - www. is fine. No SSL.

I'm a backend programmer, but it was fun to learn bootstrap 3 and put
something together, and run it through google pagespeed :-). It was a good
week of effort, along with helping her learn markdown.

~~~
splatzone
That's really sweet.

I've always been envious of my talented artist friend who does portraits for
girls he's dating. Seems like a good way to save money on gifts :p

~~~
penguindev
> Seems like a good way to save money on gifts

Yeah, it's never about the cost though, and always about the thought... that's
hard for me, even after 10 years together....women have a life-long
maintenance schedule (romantic and respectful gestures).

For you young guys dating: "great Apache warrior always mysterious and never
talks about his many ponies". That means don't try to buy a good woman (or
brag); they're not for sale. You want to be with someone who's just happy to
be with you, even if it's for a free jazz concert. "Is she part of the crew,
or part of the cargo?"

I could go on, and on, and on... it's all from "The System" in case you were
wondering. There are good women out there, so good luck to all of us finding
(and keeping) them.

------
oinksoft
This is a fun thing to do. A couple years ago on Valentine's Day I learned a
little Canvas to make this for my wife: [http://oinksoft.com/valentines-
day/](http://oinksoft.com/valentines-day/)

~~~
gulbrandr
This is very much less romantic:

    
    
      function drawHeart(ctx, x, y) {
            x += 100;
            y += 100;
    
            ctx.beginPath();
            ctx.moveTo(x, y);
            ctx.quadraticCurveTo(x + 30,  y + 60, x + 80,  y + 100);
            ctx.quadraticCurveTo(x + 130, y + 60, x + 160, y);
            ctx.bezierCurveTo   (x + 200, y - 75, x + 100, y - 90, x + 80, y - 20);
            ctx.bezierCurveTo   (x + 60,  y - 90, x - 40,  y - 75, x, y);
            ctx.fill();
            ctx.closePath();
          }
    

Good job by the way!

------
pnathan
I've done the website thing before. I am sufficiently bad at UI that it's
always come off corny.

So, I made my wife an app this year. I thought it'd be something other people
might appreciate, so I polished it into a product and am selling it:

[http://valentines2014.upside-down-
research.com/](http://valentines2014.upside-down-research.com/)

~~~
brudgers
Corn is the fundamental building block of all successful Valentine's Day
constructions.

------
dsschnau
Cute idea, and a very cute way to promote your business. I'd never heard of
brace.io and here I am using it!

------
YoukaiCountry
My wife has wanted an Android tablet for a while now, so I'm getting her a
Nexus 7 and writing a custom Valentine's card app on it for her. I think
she'll be surprised!

------
codva
I did this back in the 90s, when we had to actually know HTML to make a
website valentine. You kids have it so easy today ;)

~~~
colevscode
You still need to edit HTML to customize your valentine's site on Brace. We
just did most of the work. :)

------
noname123
One of my friend from college has a similar startup that runs Dropbox-powered
websites, 900dpi.com

I think the difference between them and brace.io is that they have a CMS that
allows people to edit text visually as opposed in code.

------
pauljonas
Doesn't seem to work -- setup a site, keep clicking the "Ship Site" button (an
odd choice of verbiage), yet, site is still only viewable in "administrator"
mode.

~~~
laurihy
(Brace dev here)

Sorry for the inconvenience. I'll look into this. Can you shoot me an email
with your site's name? lauri@brace.io

Thanks!

------
mxbc
This is well well done! The instructions say the page should refresh. Should
it refresh automatically or did I miss read (I had to refresh to make any
changes appear)?

------
llamataboot
Automatic reload not working and getting a lot of "Internal server error.
Server unreachable." messages. Maybe getting hit too hard at the moment?

~~~
colevscode
Any chance you can shoot me a screenshot or some debug info to
support@brace.io?

~~~
llamataboot
sent :)

------
bobbles
I can't get the 'next steps' and video tutorial to disappear on the admin page
in Chrome, is that intended?

~~~
laurihy
(Brace dev here)

Definitely not intended :) The modal should disappear once you make your first
change to the files in Dropbox. If this doesn't work, please shoot me an email
lauri@brace.io.

Sorry for the confusion.

------
tobyjsullivan
Looks fun but wouldn't work for me. Dropbox issues apparently. Rate limiting
maybe?

~~~
colevscode
Sorry about that! I see a few "over quota" errors. Do you have space in your
dropbox?

~~~
tutus
(1) The API request page on dropbox's website hung after clicking "allow."
After I received a "no response error," I refreshed and things started working
as expected.

(2) Once I received the "Creating new website" prompt, I could see files added
to my dropbox. Yet I still received an "oops, something went wrong error" on
brace.io. Brace.io prompted me to reselect a valentine's URL (I kept the same)
and went back to "creating new website" graphic. Failed again. Refreshed.

(3) After #2 failed again following the refresh, I changed the url name after
getting the "whoops something went wrong," which sent a POST request
containing the old url title instead of the new one. I'm not sure if this is
functioning as expected. After that hung for a minute or so, I went to #4.

(4) Finally, I tried the original URL, which prompted me to administer the
page at admin.insertvalentineurlhere.brace.io. That works!

~~~
colevscode
Sorry about the hassle. Thanks for the detailed report. The load from this
post has revealed some issues on the brace.io account server that we are
working hard to correct. Note that production urls for sites created on Brace
are hosted separately (S3 and cloudfront), and shouldn't be effected by
problems with the brace.io admin / account server.

------
chias
i made my girlfriend a website (instead of card / flowers / whatever else) for
valentine's day in college... made it from scratch and made it rather lovely.
It did not go over well.

------
jensenbox
I know it is cheap but really - what am I paying for?

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hawkharris
My phone's auto correct changed GIS to GAS...

------
angersock
I thought revenge porn was frowned upon?

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aerialcombat
did this about 15 years ago

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yoshgoodman
Awesome! Thanks man

------
tool
Downright tacky.

