

Ask HN: Practice project idea - danjiro

so the deal is i have, imo, a pretty good idea for a startup. a fantastic idea actually and for the past couple of months, i have filled pages and pages of a dedicated notebook describing the site and its functions. ive also been researching and reading blogs and stuff about how this all works. Now the thing is i have little to no programming or developing experience but have read enough blogs and posts about how you wont get anywhere without having at least a bit of programming knowledge and at least a skeleton of what you want to build. so, the past month or so ive been trying to learn ruby on rails following a tutorial to built a twitter like site. i have to admit though, programming just confuses the hell out of me and is just one of those things that i can't just get or understand easily. but, im gonna continue to try to learn it (while brushing up on my webdesign skills and learning css and html) and maybe try to learn some python with that one learnpythonthehardway tutorial.
NOW, in the meantime, i want to try to work on a smaller and much simpler project but i need help doing so. the very basics of the site i would like to achieve would be this: users come to a site where they can login (with twitter/google/facebook/etc) and post "tips/tricks" (not gonna say about what atm). then other users can vote up or down. these posts are accompanied by tags. users not logged in can only view these posts and not vote. thats the skeleton of this idea. i want to know if there are sites similar to this. ive seen some code snippet sites but i cant recall their names. even better is if there is a tutorial out there that can help guide me in making something like this, even if it is just the very basics. thanks!
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T-R
\- I'm not aware of any similar websites, but then, I'm not their target
demographic, so I probably wouldn't.

\- Keep at it with the programming, it'll click eventually. Start simple and
give yourself lots of little goals. I'm a Python fan, but I'd suggest sticking
with Ruby+Rails: Ruby's a good choice for your task, and learning both won't
help you accomplish it as much as learning one well.

\- Help people help you - People are less likely to read walls of text,
especially if most of the information is extraneous: try to be concise.

\- Don't dissuade people from helping you - You're more likely to be taken
seriously, especially on HN, if you use proper capitalization, punctuation,
etc., and avoid non-standard abbreviations.

