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A couple of month ago, after finishing (almost) Standfords Saas-class (https://www.coursera.org/course/saas https://www.coursera.org/course/saas), i decided it

A couple of month ago, after finishing (almost) Standfords Saas-class (https://www.coursera.org/course/saas https://www.coursera.org/course/saas), i decided it was time for my first webapp. A directory for wordpress themes sounded like a small enough project to start learning everything there is to know about running a webapp. What i learned the last 2 month feels more valuable then 3 years of college. The backend runs on rails, the frontend is done with backbonejs and i'm using mongolab.com as my database-(service). the skills that i learned so far are mostly technical, now i need to figure out how to get the word out... any pointers on how to do that are very welcome. I thought i start here since i love how much you help fellow hackers out. any feedback on the app would be highly appretiated.

koopajah 14y ago
It's pretty neat, I like the ability to view a lot of themes at once juste scrolling. One minor thing : when using the filter part, if I tick for example "business" then untick it maybe it should come back to "all" by default instead of showing a blank page? How do you manage the color detection, do you tag it yourself? For Orange, there's one theme that should not be here : the "screen" one but as the theme is based on pictures "wallpaper" changing maybe one of them has orange in it?
- muellerwolfram 14y ago
  oh thanks, good call with the unticking thing. i didn't even notice that. the colors are tagged by a script. i wrote a scraper for all of these marketplaces, which collects all the data, takes a screenshot, (tries) to guess the main color and uploads everything... so yeah, if there is a huge example picture with the color orange, my script thinks orange is part of the theme. maybe i can deactivate all images for the color guessing part. i have to figure that out. but thanks for the feedback, really appretiate that!
ahmadss 14y ago
Nice job. I'm in the same boat as you, so my questions are more newbie than anything else: 1 - how many hours/how much time did you spend on this, from beginning to end? 2 - what tutorial did you use for the nodejs part of this project? 3 - are you pulling in themes dynamically or through an API, or did you pre-load the themes into your database? Great job on your first app!
- muellerwolfram 14y ago
  1) hard to say. i started 2 month ago, and maybe spend about 3 hours a day on average on app-related stuff. when i started i only had little experience in rails, but had absolutly no experience in backbone. so it took me quite a while to get into it. 2) to start out i read this http://coenraets.org/blog/2011/12/backbone-js-wine-cellar-tutorial-part-1-getting-started/ http://coenraets.org/blog/2011/12/backbone-js-wine-cellar-tu... and then everytime i was stuck i search for a solution on stackoverflow. i'm not using nodejs btw. just backbone for the frontend. once you done a couple of tutorials, i recommend using http://www.brunch.io http://www.brunch.io 3) the themes are coming from my rails backend. i have a mongodb database on http://www.mongolab.com http://www.mongolab.com. the backbone app makes a request to my rails server and gets a respond as json. you can see how that looks like at http://www.themescroller.com/themes.json http://www.themescroller.com/themes.json

koopajah 14y ago

It's pretty neat, I like the ability to view a lot of themes at once juste scrolling. One minor thing : when using the filter part, if I tick for example "business" then untick it maybe it should come back to "all" by default instead of showing a blank page? How do you manage the color detection, do you tag it yourself? For Orange, there's one theme that should not be here : the "screen" one but as the theme is based on pictures "wallpaper" changing maybe one of them has orange in it?

muellerwolfram 14y ago
oh thanks, good call with the unticking thing. i didn't even notice that. the colors are tagged by a script. i wrote a scraper for all of these marketplaces, which collects all the data, takes a screenshot, (tries) to guess the main color and uploads everything... so yeah, if there is a huge example picture with the color orange, my script thinks orange is part of the theme. maybe i can deactivate all images for the color guessing part. i have to figure that out. but thanks for the feedback, really appretiate that!

ahmadss 14y ago

Nice job. I'm in the same boat as you, so my questions are more newbie than anything else: 1 - how many hours/how much time did you spend on this, from beginning to end? 2 - what tutorial did you use for the nodejs part of this project? 3 - are you pulling in themes dynamically or through an API, or did you pre-load the themes into your database? Great job on your first app!

muellerwolfram 14y ago
1) hard to say. i started 2 month ago, and maybe spend about 3 hours a day on average on app-related stuff. when i started i only had little experience in rails, but had absolutly no experience in backbone. so it took me quite a while to get into it. 2) to start out i read this http://coenraets.org/blog/2011/12/backbone-js-wine-cellar-tutorial-part-1-getting-started/ http://coenraets.org/blog/2011/12/backbone-js-wine-cellar-tu... and then everytime i was stuck i search for a solution on stackoverflow. i'm not using nodejs btw. just backbone for the frontend. once you done a couple of tutorials, i recommend using http://www.brunch.io http://www.brunch.io 3) the themes are coming from my rails backend. i have a mongodb database on http://www.mongolab.com http://www.mongolab.com. the backbone app makes a request to my rails server and gets a respond as json. you can see how that looks like at http://www.themescroller.com/themes.json http://www.themescroller.com/themes.json