
Show HN: VanityPageMaker - Easiest way to create your own personal brand page - jason_tko
http://www.vanitypagemaker.com/
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jason_tko
I'm the business co-founder at MakeLeaps in Japan. As a way to scratch my own
itch for a simple online profile page, I wrote a spec, registered a domain,
and project managed the creation of VanityPageMaker.

I considered using <http://about.me>, but somehow I prefer a simple HTML site
that I can control, edit and host myself.

This kind of site is well within the talents of my co-founder Paul, but I
opted to hire and manage freelancers so Paul could continue focusing on
managing our small technical team building our invoicing platform for
businesses in Japan.

Basic Tech Specs: Ruby on Rails + MySQL database + Nginx proxing to Unicorn
workers, hosted on Rackspace Cloud Server.

This is very much a version 1.0, but all comments and feedback are
appreciated. I'm in the process of writing a blog post on how I designed and
built VPM as a non-technical co-founder and without writing a line of code.

For some sample profiles, please check the 3 featured profiles on the main
page.

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patio11
I made one (Jason and company are good friends of mine). The site works as
advertised. <http://www.kalzumeus.com/vanity>

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amirmc
That is the first time I've ever seen what you look like.

~~~
po
Well, he doesn't _always_ look like that. Sometimes he's sleeping. :-)

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krmmalik
This is exactly what i've been looking for, for the past couple of years now.
At first I was using MyOnePage and About.me looked interesting, but this
solution is perfect for me because it gives me the granular control that I
need. Some hosting might have been nice, but i'm certainly not going to
complain at all.

I was stuck of a minute thinking about where I could host my html file since
both my hosting sites are running Wordpress blogs and it can be a bit of a
pain getting pure html pages to work alongside Wordpress - At least in my
experience.

So i just opted for my public folder on Dropbox instead. Its as good as any
other location, hopefully.

Unless anyone knows of any distinct reason as to why i shouldnt do it this
way?

Here's my profile link: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3417415/krmmalik/index.html>

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mvkel
I like the idea of it just being a batch process for making creative files you
can just dump into a web directory somewhere. Flavors.me and About.me are
great, but if you want that extra level of editorial/functionality control.

I have to ask: is this just a fun project, or is there a business here? I have
to wonder how many people really want/care about this extra control, outside
of web developers, who would probably build their own from scratch anyway.

From a business perspective, you almost have a product that has competition
(vanity page site) marketed to people who don't need it (web
developers/administrators). A tough place to be.

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thekevan
I though the final step was a little misleading. It made it seem as you have
to enter your email address to get the download. I clicked download without
entering my email address and I thought it was going to give me an error
saying it need my email address. It worked, though.

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jason_tko
Thanks for the feedback - I thought it was clear this step was optional with a
call to action of "Generate my Vanity Page!" down the bottom, and text along
these lines:

> Would you like to hear about exciting new features from VanityPageMaker.com?

> Enter your E-Mail and click SIGN UP to be added to the Newsletter list.

I'll have a think about the best way to communicate this though. Cheers for
taking the time to comment.

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blhack
Hey Jason,

I though the _exact_ same thing, and had even entered my spamtrap email before
noticing that it wasn't actually necessary.

(By spamtrap, I just mean an old yahoo account that I never get emails I care
about to).

It might be useful to include some text there indicating that you're all done
creating your vanity profile now, and by the way if you'd like to sign up for
the newsletter, here is how to do so.

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pan69
I really like this idea. The only suggestion I can make is to hire a really
good designer to work on this because everything sort of looks all over the
shop. To be a vanity page it really needs a solid level of polish on the
visual side of things.

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grantjgordon
Is this significantly different than, say, flavors.me or about.me?

~~~
jason_tko
Yes. This site does not require an account, and it doesn't host your profile.

It generates a zip file, generated by VPM after you've entered with your own
text and images.

Then you have full control and ownership over your own profile, and you can
host it wherever you like, such as mine on <http://www.jasonwinder.com>

