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Show HN: Open-sourcing my wedding website on my first anniversary
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
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- iMuzz 8y agoThis is cute :)
- rampatra 8y agoThanks!
- evancharles 8y agoThanks for sharing! I was just searching github for something like this for my own wedding.
- rampatra 8y agoGlad you liked it!
- Walkman 8y agoI still find the idea of a digital wedding invitation pretty strange, because here in Hungary the bride and the fiancé invite everybody in person together. Maybe distant relatives are invited by mail or something. Is digital invitation a common thing nowadays? Or was it more common even years ago in other countries?
- tptacek 8y agoSites for weddings in the US have been common for many years.
- gowld 8y agoThe question was about "digital invitation", not website.
- devonkim 8y agoNine years ago I made a wedding site with Wordpress but sent invitees either the URL or a traditional paper invitation for those that appreciate that touch. When everyone is around the country or even several other countries it would be impractical to visit everyone in person. We didn’t have much money and financed the wedding entirely ourselves so this was necessary as well.
- numbers 8y agoYes, sites are the best way to get information for weddings IMO. What we did was: send out an invitation and it had the date + website (no other info) so people HAD to go on the website to get that information. I love the idea of the couple inviting everyone in person, I would've loved to do that too. We invited close family and friends so would've been obvious.
- WestCoastJustin 8y agoWe did the same. Paper + only date & website link. Worked out awesome. Then you can update the site as people ask questions or need more detailed info, etc.
- kcorbitt 8y agoInteresting! I assume most of the invitees live locally then? My wife and I sent invitations to friends and family in 6 countries on 3 continents, so inviting everyone in person would have been impractical. We didn't expect eg. her extended family in Chile to actually show up, but we wanted to formally invite them anyway so they would know we were thinking of them. We did actually have attendees from two continents and four countries though.
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- organsnyder 8y agoThe tradition for many in the US (in my experience, at least—it's far from universal, of course) is that the paper invitation is considered "official"—often even more-so than an in-person invite. In-person invites are still welcome, of course, but they're often seen as informal. Since a mailed invitation is already considered by many to be the most formal route, it makes sense that electronic invites have gained popularity—especially for those looking to save money (printing fancy invitations and mailing them easily costs hundreds of dollars). When I got married in 2006, we sent paper invitations with postage-paid RSVP response cards. They were custom-printed by a local printer. Between printing and postage costs, we must have spent over $500 on invitations alone. This was for a very traditional wedding in Michigan.
- Spivak 8y agoNot kidding. And once a print shop catches a whiff that it's for a wedding the price goes waaaaay up. We're doing digital invites by default and paper invites for family that who would get frustrated trying to use one. Cheaper, better for the environment, most people think it's neat, and it's a fun project.
- bronco21016 8y agoAs others have said, in the US the formal paper invite is considered official. When my wife and I married we still did this but we encouraged people to RSVP via the website or email. No sense in sending more paper. It’s sad to me that we felt so pressured to do the paper invites. They’re ridiculously overpriced and all of that paper and emissions for delivery for something that can easily be delivered electronically and instantly for near zero cost. The entire wedding industry thrives on norms like these and it’s amazing to me that technology doesn’t displace more aspects.
- dylan604 8y agoHow do you let people know about the website? Social media posts? How do you contact people not on social media about the website? A mailer? A phone call/text? These are just questions I would ask to understand why paper invitations are still a thing. Rather than providing a self addressed stamped envelope for the RSVP, just put the website into it. Also, people love to hang things like invitations on their fridge as a constant reminder of an event that's somewhat far into the future. Rarely is that something printed off of a website, but a card received in the mail will pretty much get placed there straight away (or maybe after sitting on the counter for a period of time).
- jmiserez 8y agoDo you have the current postal mailing adresses of all of your friends? I certainly don't, so I'd have to call them or write them on social media first just to get the address.
- davidcbc 8y ago> How do you let people know about the website? Social media posts? How do you contact people not on social media about the website? A mailer? A phone call/text? Someone should invent some kind of electronic mail for these things! > Also, people love to hang things like invitations on their fridge as a constant reminder of an event that's somewhat far into the future. Rarely is that something printed off of a website, but a card received in the mail will pretty much get placed there straight away (or maybe after sitting on the counter for a period of time). My wife and I did email invitations because we didn't consider it worth $500 for someone to have something to stick on their fridge. We were able to automatically send an email reminder a week or two ahead of time instead.
- davedx 8y agoWe sent very carefully hand-crafted invitations to all our guests in the mail. We did a wedding website to get the RSVP's, as we live in a different country to many of our guests so postal RSVP's would have been difficult (we sometimes have issues receiving mail here). The website was also a great information point on how to get to our venue. So basically a bit of old and a bit of new. It worked well :)
- osrec 8y agoHappy Anniversary! For those looking to use this, the following may help a little: find /path/to/folder -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/Ram/YourName/g' find /path/to/folder -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/Antara/OtherHalfsName/g' Edit: FianceeName -> OtherHalfsName (some people are easily offended) :P
- brian-armstrong 8y agoAre women banned on HN now? I think I missed that ToS change.
- sov 8y agoThere's no gender specific wording anywhere on the open sourced website, or in the parent post, so the parent's regex works regardless of who's doing the regexing.
- Willamin 8y agoI think they mean the word "Fiancee" which refers to a woman that is engaged to be married.
- sov 8y agoI don't know anyone who uses fiancee in a gendered way; all my engaged friends refer to their future husband/wife as their fiancee (though, granted, I'm probably not as old as many here who are already wed so I might just be out of the loop). Google's definition of fiancee seems to offer both wife-to-be and husband-to-be as synonyms as well, so I'm not really sure the parent's sneer is really valid in this case.
- platinumrad 8y agoApparently the number of "e"s matters and one means male and two means female. In practice, I highly doubt anyone actually knows or cares.
- brian_herman__ 8y agoCool!
- Applethief 8y agoCongrats!
- rbyrne 8y agoThanks for sharing. I just got married and did my own site - I forgot how time consuming even a regular HTML / CSS static site could be when you have a million other things going on - I would have loved to have used this.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoI got married last month and thought about doing a site for a while (I just may still make one just for her sake with all the wedding pictures) but being a full-time web developer I knew it wouldn't just be slap on some pictures and HTML/CSS. I cannot tell you how many times I've struggled with CSS or JS and I use both daily! They're painful lessons, sometimes too easy to forget when you leave the front-end.
- rbyrne 8y agoI did that as well; I threw all the images afterwards up on a S3 bucket and set up Cloudfront in front and it's relatively easy / cheap to host.
- briandear 8y ago> This event is no way close to ethnic. The bride & groom would like to have some "shots before the knot". With booze flowing down the floor and the western attire on, everyone would be busy showing off their new moves on the stage which they have finely honed. Lastly, expect some beer pong matches & karaoke for sure. The money quote. I would have loved to have gone to this wedding!
- Gruselbauer 8y agoIndeed. The whole site exudes a nonchalance and cultural pluralism that just makes me think I'd have had heaps of fun attending, despite being from the other end of the globe and another background entirely.
- bmsleight_ 8y agoOk feel old. 20.5 years ago I sent out a link to a party celebrating our engagement. I spent more time explaining how to get to the website, than people finding website helpful. Still married - so get off my lawn :)
- shakna 8y agoI had the same expirience of 'How do I use a website?' vs Website Has Information just over two years ago for mine. Unless it's the first hit on Google, or all over people's preferred social media... They're as clueless as ever.
- tyingq 8y agoThey probably liked that better than you breaking out the slide projector when they came over for dinner though.
- danesparza 8y agoI feel older. I sent dead trees. Only dead trees. And that was just 23.5 years ago. :-)
- Turqueso 8y agoI got married almost 3 years ago and wanted to do the same but i would have end up like you. Printing is expensive! For my Bachelorette party I send an image as invitation by WhatsApp.
- nthitz 8y agoNice! One thing about the RSVP, it has a section where you can specify the number of "Wife or kids" you are bringing. Probably could be reworded to something more neutral. Congrats on your anniversary!
- snek 8y agoI was totally on-board until he mentioned he works for Oath.
- yoongfook 8y agoI’ve got a different format - timeline style: https://www.09092018.com https://www.09092018.com Let me know if anyone wants me to open source this :)
- encoderer 8y agoI love what the OP did, and I really love this too. Great spin on the traditional wedding site. I'm curious, have you seen anything similar on other "site builders" like Squarespace?
- cuchoi 8y agoLove the concept, what's the stack? Would be willing to help open source it.
- ianfoo 8y agoIt was generated by create-react-app, as revealed here: https://www.09092018.com/manifest.json https://www.09092018.com/manifest.json https://facebook.github.io/create-react-app/ https://facebook.github.io/create-react-app/
- weisser 8y agowould love that. gorgeous design.
- dominotw 8y ago> Mich: Ermm, OK! There is a typo.
- jcrites 8y agoNice design! Please open source if you’re up for it.
- nilleo 8y agoGetting ready to plan a wedding after double digit year dating -- The timeline approach is brilliant, thanks for sharing!
- zahreeley 8y agoHolding phone on engagement
- laurynas-s 8y agoNice! Had an idea to make a website for my wedding too (married one year ago), but in the end, decided to go with traditional paper invitations as would be difficult to explain to older people how to RSVP and paper invitations would be more cost-efficient (By comparing the time needed to build the website with my hourly rate). For big Indian weddings with hundreds of people, I do see that the website can benefit by not needing to contact each person about RSVP status.
- dominotw 8y ago> For big Indian weddings with hundreds of people, I do see that the website can benefit with not needing to contact each person about RSVP. Indian weddings don't care about RSVP count, there is no assigned seating :D.
- tathougies 8y agoAt a traditional indian wedding, you don't invite people. You tell your aunts and uncles and friends, and they tell their aunts and uncles and friends, and they tell theirs, etc, until you end up with 800 people at your wedding.
- sizzle 8y agoAt $25-50+ a head for food and alcohol at reception alone, that is a huge number unless you come from wealth... However I think I read somewhere the average cost of South Asian wedding is $100-150k in California. Ouch.
- tathougies 8y agoBuffet
- kkarakk 8y agobuffet's prices are calculated per plate too
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- hit8run 8y agoLooking at the bloated and checked in node_modules folder makes me wanna cry. Yah it's probably all just dev dependencies but building a static website shouldn’t feel like rocket science. People were creating wedding websites in the 90s with just one html file and that’s it. Welcome to the age of total bloat.
- andrewguenther 8y agoThe package.json declares 4 build dependencies and 3 runtime. Most of that bloat probably comes from Gulp, which is one of the most ridiculously bloated tools I've ever seen.
- ptd 8y agoWhat is the alternative to tools like Gulp or Gatsby for those of us who want to make (fairly)simple websites? In my case, I’m a Data Scientist looking to make a portfolio website. Nothing too crazy but more than hello world. Should we just work with HTML? Materialize CSS? GitHub pages w/ Jekyll? Nextjs? Bootstrap? Should we just head back to Wordpress and Wix? Wixcode? Is Gulp the best option? Is it worth paying a professional to create the site for me? I’m very intereted in developer opinions. Any feedback is much appreciated. Thank you.
- austincheney 8y agoOne alternative is to not use them. If your target website actually is simple then prove it by not imposing a slow bloated architectural failure.
- andrewguenther 8y ago> What is the alternative to tools like Gulp or Gatsby for those of us who want to make (fairly)simple websites? Gulp has nothing directly to do with building a website, it is a compilation tool of sorts that allows you to transform your source files into something you'll end up deploying via various plugins. For example, you can use gulp to collapse all your JS source files into one or to transpile it into something more cross browser compatible. The reason I dislike Gulp is that it has a massive number of dependencies and really is just an overcomplicated reimplementation of pipes. Personally, I prefer Webpack. It is also a fairly large tool, but at the very least it actually does something useful out of the box. When I migrated our projects from Gulp to Webpack, I replaced a over 500 lines of gulp code with about 50 lines of config and a small bash script.
- dvtrn 8y agoNothing to add but congrats on year one of marriage, and here's to many more. Thanks for sharing this with us :)
- rampatra 8y agoYou're welcome. Hope it helps!
- kygyufyufuf 8y agoBadly expressed, sorry. Deleted.
- utam0k 8y agoCongrats! Thanks to this I made happy mood from morning.
- rampatra 8y agoThat's really sweet of you :)
- PascLeRasc 8y agoCool project! Was this collaboratory between the two of you? I especially love this photo [1], I wish that style of formal wear was more common in America. [1] https://wedding.rampatra.com/img/eng_pics/NGP_4089-lg.jpg https://wedding.rampatra.com/img/eng_pics/NGP_4089-lg.jpg
- cdolan 8y agoFor my wedding I tried to not have any technology on me for photos. I always feared having a great photo like that one - but then it can look "dated" with an iPhone 6 in it. Without that iPhone, that photo could be from anytime 1950-2020!
- mi100hael 8y agoI don't think it's a secret they got married in 2017, though.
- rampatra 8y agoYes, I coded and she tested it. She also helped me with the color themes. Lastly, she was the final "go/no go", after all, she is the boss.
- rampatra 8y ago*was=gave
- dwheeler 8y agoAdorable. My best to you both.
- rampatra 8y agothanks a million :)
- th3iedkid 8y agoWow! Great timing...Getting married in a couple of days and here 's our website https://mamamami.wedding https://mamamami.wedding
- davmar 8y agoi gave you my email address. what have i done? haha
- rampatra 8y agoI won't spam you, don't worry :D
- stevetodd 8y agoWe did one quick and easy with squarespace. We had people RSVP with a form we set up there. Took about an hour. Worked awesome!
- potench 8y agoMy wedding website from 6 years ago is also open sourced https://github.com/potench/shum-harden/ https://github.com/potench/shum-harden/ It is not mobile optimized, whoops http://shum-harden.com http://shum-harden.com
- xiconfjs 8y agoquite crazy...I like it.
- anikdas 8y agoI didn't do a website for my wedding. But did make a webapp using firebase to manage all the invitations (mark to whome invitations were sent/ basic analytics) etc. If anyone is interested I can opensource the code.
- pokstad 8y agoI just went to my old wedding domain name to see if it was still up (www.paulandtessa.com) and it turns out another couple bought it for their wedding next February. Amazingly, they are from the same city as us (Long Beach). I'm not sure what the chances of that happening considering anyone in the world could have bought it. It's a good thing I didn't renew the domain name so that someone else could enjoy it for their guests. Keep that it mind when you are gobbling up domain names for important life events ;)
- winningcontinue 8y agogreat story. highly unlikely coincidence. same names and wedding at the same city. domain names can have different easy to remember permutations and there are different top level domains so it's likely the couple would've registered something similar. overall good advice on not keeping it permanent, although I could understand some people turning it into a family business or something.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoHeh, rent our domain for $5 a month! Or, buy the homepage, just send us pictures and captions, and pick one of our templates... Would probably work best for highly common name combinations.
- ArrayList 8y agoYou should RSVP and crash their wedding! I'm sure they'd get a kick out of it!
- freedomben 8y agoHey I'm trying to RSVP but it's rejecting my invite code :-( Dude, excellent work on that site by the way. It's incredible, really.
- rampatra 8y agoDid you try 271117 as the invite code?
- julius559 8y agoPutting the placeholder for the +1(s) as "Wife or kids", Yikes... Are women allowed to use the form?
- shitloadofbooks 8y agoOr even unmarried men...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- system2 8y agoNice catch. I believe it is cultural.
- czue 8y agoNice, this is great! I did the same thing with mine a couple years back: Demo: http://coryandro.com/ http://coryandro.com/ Code: https://github.com/czue/django-wedding-website https://github.com/czue/django-wedding-website Writeup: https://buildwithdjango.com/blog/post/wedding-website/ https://buildwithdjango.com/blog/post/wedding-website/
- dustinmoris 8y agoWow, all these wedding websites here look amazing. Ours was a really simple static webpage which I hacked together in a single day. At least our guests loved it :) http://hetalsaidyes.com http://hetalsaidyes.com However, I shall say that we made the website for convenience, we still sent out letters with a formal invitation. The website was more like a place for people to quickly check details and later to distribute photos by guests.
- vikin9 8y agoI could also open-source mine wedding page, but it would be very similar to https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
- ranpr0 8y ago[Off-topic] I feel there is a need of many more open source projects. Most open source projects these days are backed by big cos. There are hardly any large open source projects nowadays which are not by big cos. Why is there no credible alternative to Uber which is open source ? How about open source stack for security software ?
- Double_a_92 8y agoBecause it's not so easy to make a stable big software without lots of money and people. And only big corporations have that sort of money to spend on such things.
- artemonster 8y agonever knew up until now that this was a thing. insert "but why?" GIF
- reacharavindh 8y agoI used a service called withjoy.com about 279 days ago :-) I primarily went to the service instead of a storied page because I needed a system to collect RSVPs. I could have hacked one up together, but this service offered everything I wanted, in a easy way, so I made the choice. All our guests liked the website. https://withjoy.com/evelynandaravindh/ https://withjoy.com/evelynandaravindh/
- hit8run 8y agoWow. Someone deleted my comment without any notice or whatever. What kind of practice is this here on HN? I was not offending the author or someone else. I was just criticising the size of the repo and the number of tools that are required to develop this single static website in contrast to a simple html file. People started to upvote and agree with me and the reaction is to simply delete? If this is the new practice here I'll have to ask myself if it makes sense to keep participating in this community.
- outime 8y agoI still can see your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18557415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18557415 (think you meant this one). I believe comments aren't removed here at all. There are some comments which are objectively useless/offending in many threads and they're just flagged but never deleted, so I doubt they'd remove yours when it's a valid technical critique (if perhaps it can be expressed less harshly).
- pjc50 8y agoHow does the "RSVP to google sheets" work? That's an extremely useful feature to have on a static site with no backend. It looks like it's related to this line: $.post('https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbzUqz44wOat0DiGjRV1gUnRf4HRqlRARWggjvHKWvqniP7eVDG-/exec' https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbzUqz44wOat0DiGjRV1g..., data) ... how does the security work on that, or can I RSVP to your wedding too?
- gadders 8y agoI think there is some extra info here: https://github.com/dwyl/learn-to-send-email-via-google-script-html-no-server https://github.com/dwyl/learn-to-send-email-via-google-scrip...
- hknd 8y agoHe is referring to https://github.com/dwyl/learn-to-send-email-via-google-script-html-no-server https://github.com/dwyl/learn-to-send-email-via-google-scrip... It would be quite easy to check the rsvp code in appscript. E.g. have a sheet with all the guests, and give a random number (rsvp code) to each guest. Then on each rsvp request you could check whether that rsvp code exists in the code column. If yes: you'll add the answer to that row. If no: return an error.
- michaelt 8y agoHow does the "RSVP to google sheets" work? I don't know how the wedding website works, but I've done some basic recording data to google sheets like so:- 1. Create 'google forms' one-page survey, gathering outputs into a spreadsheet. 2. Use browser debug tools to figure out form field names, which will be things like 'entry.1150050082' 3. curl "https://docs.google.com/forms/d/ https://docs.google.com/forms/d/ 1xFOZk3D1...wnIjGAf0/formResponse?ifq&entry.1150050082=FOO&entry.1477423851=BAR&entry.592766186=BAZ&submit=Submit" or the appends a row to the google sheet with the values FOO, BAR and BAZ. I assume if your site embedded a form that sent the same request as that curl query, it would do the same thing. Obviously, this isn't going to win you any awards for highly maintainable professional design at work. But if you want something quick and you aren't fussed about whether it works a year from now, it can get the job done.
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- Sander_Marechal 8y agoOh nice, me too! Here's the site (hosted on my home server, so may be slow under heavy traffic): https://www.astrid-en-sander.nl/ https://www.astrid-en-sander.nl/ It's not nearly as pretty as all the others here, but I am a backend developer, not a designer. You cat get the source code at https://github.com/sandermarechal/wedding https://github.com/sandermarechal/wedding
- deepaksurti 8y ago@rampatra Your Pull Request was approved and merged by Antara. Happy anniversary!
- rampatra 8y agoThe most creative anniversary wish till now :D
- snissn 8y agoCongrats!
- intenscia 8y agoIt’s not as polished as the poster but I’ve open sourced our wedding website should it help serve as inspiration for you https://github.com/intenscia/Wedding https://github.com/intenscia/Wedding
- onwardly 8y agoWhen buying a wedding domain, you can buy domains like .party and .dance, which adds a nice touch I think.
- Technetium_Hat 8y agoUnfortunately, those are much more expensive than .com domains.
- ai_ia 8y agoNice to see a fellow Odiya trending on HN. :)
- andrestc 8y agoHow hard would it be to set up a backend payment service to receive $$ for gifts?
- rampatra 8y agoIt's not that complex. You can have a paypal.me address or set up a stripe account with buymeacoffee.com. There would be many more but these two are at the top of my mind now.
- kirubakaran 8y agoRelated idea: Prediction market for how long a relationship / marriage is going to last. If most of your friends are betting against the marriage, perhaps you should call it off, and the betters get their money back. Not sure how to solve the moral hazard problem though.
- maticaputti 8y agoI want an invitation code!
- rampatra 8y agoit's mentioned on the github repo :) It is 271117.
- mindshakers 8y agohttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Piccam https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Piccam