A friend and I worked on a typical weekend project lately. A Font Awesome to PNG online generator (http://fa2png.io). I was great fun. It took us about 24h total from concept to live deployment. It's a flask app deployed to digital ocean.
We were on HN in 2nd place for about half a day. Got about 17.000 unique visits in the first two days, a couple of twitter mentions and now about 200-300 visits a day.
It was an awesome experience. Very satisfying because it felt kind of complete when we launched. That's not typical for a web app. Although there are always more features to add. We felt like the app is exactly doing what we planned it should.
I need this basically everyday. I develop iOS apps and need pngs for icons all the time, and I'm just not that handy with photoshop yet. Please don't let this app die anytime soon!
You could. Not sure if Heroku offers a full fledged linux environment. Also there are unlimited databases (MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, CouchDB or Redis ) included in the 1€ fee.
With each user-interaction that updates a page fragment it modifies the address in the browser's address bar to correspond to the current state. If somebody were to copy and paste that URL into a new tab, your site would load the complete interface if you've structured your back-end code correctly.
You do this by building in logic to the part of the code that outputs your view to see whether the request is coming as a PJAX request, or not. If it is, you output the page-fragment, which is then added to your existing DOM. If it's not a PJAX request, your back-end outputs the entire code for your site.
There's a limitation to PJAX where you can only update one fragment at a time, though PJAXR seems to address that limitation by providing support for updating multiple-fragments simultaneously. Either way, you get the huge advantage of having a fully-crawlable site without needing to integrate pre-rendering work-arounds for search-engine compatibility.
We were on HN in 2nd place for about half a day. Got about 17.000 unique visits in the first two days, a couple of twitter mentions and now about 200-300 visits a day.
It was an awesome experience. Very satisfying because it felt kind of complete when we launched. That's not typical for a web app. Although there are always more features to add. We felt like the app is exactly doing what we planned it should.
I wrote about it in more detail here http://jannikweyrich.com/blog/2014/05/26/weekend-project-fon...