Sorry - weekend project

In order to take a break from the “long-term construction” and stretch my fingers to briefly switch 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, because they constantly spin in the head, as probably for many who read it. Therefore, pretty quickly one of the simplest and most understandable was chosen, namely: anonymous confessions. Visitors admit to actions that they are not proud of, while others, by voting, decide whether this act of forgiveness is worthy or not. Naturally, all this is anonymous.

I started to develop the project quite spontaneously, but because The idea and implementation itself is quite simple - it rather added speed and made it possible to do everything on the same wavelength.

Implementation

The first thing I did was sketch a minimalistic design, if I may call it that. It didn’t take much time. a vision of how roughly this should look came along with the idea itself. It only remained to deal 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 randomly, by clicking on a single button. Maybe then the tape will still be added, but for now I like the current version more.

Then it was the turn to implement the server side. The basis was taken by the Phalcon version 1.3.3 framework. 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 productivity and development speed / usability. 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 began - the deployment. A suitable domain was found in the bins. Deployed and configured VPS on DigitalOcean. Received https certificate and configured attendance counters. The project was uploaded and launched. Everything worked.

So what now?

This logical question arose in my head after the empty project was ready for the influx of "anxiously waiting for its visitors." Naturally, it itself will not float, so I initially scored 15 pieces of “confession” based on real events of communication on the Internet.

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

Imagine my surprise when on Tuesday I saw 1,100 unique visitors and over 10,000 views on the counter. It was a pretty pleasant surprise and I got to see the statistics. The main traffic did not come from reddit, but from a dozen small forums where people posted links to their confessions. By that time, the database already had about 200 confessions from visitors and about 7000 “forgiveness” and “punishments”. 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 practically no “garbage” messages, in the form of unreadable rubbish or frankly 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 was an understanding that people do not go where you want, but where they want to. To be honest, I don’t know how the project will develop in the long term, time will tell. And it will be quite interesting to see.

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