Save time on connecting fonts. One year later
Hello!
Exactly a year ago, on July 12, a post was published about the idea to collect free fonts and organize convenient access to them. This date will be considered the birthday of the current WebFont.ru .
Today there will be a narrative of what and how it was possible to do.
Statistics
Over the past month:
- About 6 thousand people visited our site;
- almost 2000 archives with fonts were downloaded from the site (download statistics from plugins are not taken into account);
- processed about 2 million font connections by third-party sites;
Our plugins for editors have been installed 2,800 times, and extensions for Opera Next and Chrome a little over 300 times.
What is done
Plugins
Today we have plugins for Sublime Text 2 and Php Storm \ Web Storm. A plugin for NotePad ++ is on its way. All plugins are available for installation directly from the editors. Read more about their work on the site .
Polygon
For more than six months, we have a Polygon . And more recently, he learned to save your work, on the principle of jsfiddle, codepen, etc.
Expansion
We thought that it’s sometimes difficult to choose the right font on a third-party site by eye and solved the issue radically. We made our training ground available for any site by creating an extension for browsers. While it works in the new Opera and Chrome. You can install the extension from the respective stores.
User Registration
Most recently, we opened user registration on the site. It is, first of all, due to the need to store work created at the training ground with reference to the user. More will come next.
And this is all we multiplied by the speed of work. Search gives options suddenly, saving work no longer than 2 seconds and without reloading the page, registration is as simple as possible.
What does it all work on
The very first version of the site lived on the usual WordPress for a long time, but at the end of May we finished the main work on creating our own engine.
Everything is spinning on a dedicated server running gunicorn + nginx. Patterning is done using lodash.js, and the platform itself is django. We have our own search, written in javascript. In general, we have a lot of javascript, so much that if you disable it, it will be impossible to use the site. Caching is configured using nginx + memcache.
Fonts for external connection are distributed from the cloud in Selectel, which allows us to distribute the load. Cheap and cheerful. Previously, we used S3 from Amazon, but it turned out many times more expensive + caching there only through CloudFront. As a result, we hold Amazon as a reserve.
Fonts
At the time of writing, we have published 160 fonts in 380 styles, all are free and support the Cyrillic alphabet.
Communications
First of all, we strive to make a convenient service for us, because it’s stupid to create something without listening to colleagues. To do this, we have a meeting room on the site, a VKontakte group and an account on Twitter . There we post all the information related to the innovations on our service, publish links to useful articles on typography and take advice from users. We highly recommend subscribing in order not to miss something critically important or very useful.
By the way, if you write or translate good articles about fonts, you can safely offer links to us, and we will publish them in our community. And if you do not write and translate, then someday we will start to do it ourselves, although not our profile.
What are you better at Google Webfonts?
This question has become on duty everywhere. No better. We have different tasks, although there are similarities at some points. We want to note that we do not recommend connecting fonts from WebFont.ru to our sites and offer to download and store them locally. Imports to external connections are used for demonstration purposes, so that you can see how it looks on the site without downloading the font. In addition, some fonts even have connection compatibility labels with Google Webfonts. They tried on, approached, connected with GWF or downloaded to ourselves - this is how we see the use of the service. In turn, we have very convenient tools for downloading and the entire process of obtaining fonts is simplified as much as possible.
Total
Plans
It turned out that they began to notice us on the Habré, a large number of links appeared in personal blogs, forums and social networks. networks. In addition, having received a couple of sensible and inspiring comments from the co-founder of Smashingmagazine.com, we have become even stronger in the desire to make the most convenient and useful font service in the world. Work in this direction has not stopped at all for a year, and ideas are not running out. For example, very soon we will have the first widget working on our api.
Acknowledgments
As before, we express our gratitude to all who are not indifferent to the project and supporting it with our advice. We listen to you, read everything that you write to us and take into account. Thanks a lot!
For a snack
It was and it was .
Thanks for attention.