Sorry - Weekend Project

In order to have a little rest from the “long-term construction” and stretch my fingers briefly to shift my attention, I decided to develop and launch some small project over the weekend.

Idea

I did not have to go far for the idea, since in my head they spin constantly, as probably many people read it. Therefore, rather quickly, one of the simplest and most understandable was chosen, namely anonymous confessions. Visitors are recognized in actions that they are not proud of, and others, using a vote, decide whether this act is worthy of forgiveness or not. Naturally, all this is anonymous.

I started developing the project rather spontaneously, but since The idea and implementation itself is quite simple - it rather added speed and made it possible to do everything on one wave.
')

Implementation

First of all, I sketched a minimal design, if you can call it that. Time spent on him not much, because a vision of how approximately it should look came along with the idea itself. It remained to deal only with the "technical" details: indents, fonts, etc. One of the "chips" of the project is that it does not have a single tape that can be flipped. All confessions are issued in random order by clicking on a single button. Perhaps then the tape will still be added, but so far I like the current version more.

Then came the turn of the implementation of the server part. The framework was based on the Phalcon framework version 1.3.3. I consider this framework to be one of the best PHP frameworks at the moment, because in my opinion, it provides the best compromise between performance and speed / ease of development. Of course, he, like everyone, has his own shortcomings, but they are gradually being corrected and have nothing to do with this project.

After the project was debugged on the local machine, the final stage came - deploy. A suitable domain was found in the bins. Deployed and configured VPS on DigitalOcean. The https certificate was obtained and attendance counters were configured. The project has been flooded and launched. Everything worked.

So what now?

This logical question arose in my head after an empty project was ready for the influx of “anxiously waiting visitors.” Naturally, it does not float itself, so I originally scored 15 pieces of “confessions” based on real-life communication on the Internet.

This weekend and the development of the project is over. On Monday morning, I posted a link to reddit and went into work affairs.

What was my surprise when on Tuesday I saw 1,100 unique visitors and more than 10,000 views on the counter. It was quite a pleasant surprise and I climbed up to look at the statistics. The main traffic did not go from reddit, but from a dozen small forums in which people posted links to hooked recognitions. By that time, there were already about 200 confessions from visitors and about 7,000 “forgiveness” and “punishments” in the database. Honestly, I did not expect this, but it was very nice to look at such indicators on the second day of the site.



Interestingly, there were almost no “junk” messages in the form of unreadable rubbish or openly offensive messages. And for those that were, a small moderation tool was quickly created, with which you can filter out unwanted content and correct grammatical errors so that the site is pleasant to read.

Despite the simplicity of the project, I got a very interesting experience. There is an understanding that people are not going where you want, but where they want. To be honest, I don’t know how the project’s affairs will develop in the long term, time will tell. And it will be quite interesting to look at it.

Thanks to everyone who read it. Who did not like it - I 'm sorry .