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Instead of a card, make your valentine a website (brace.io)
65 points by colevscode on Feb 13, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 38 comments


I have a tradition of making my girlfriend a Web app every Valentine's Day and other holidays. She's a GAS analyst, so I try to incorporate location - based features.

This year I got her three locked wooden boxes with numbers written on them. The numbers represent the miles she has to travel to unlock them using a companion app called MapStreak (www.mapstreak.com).

Making apps for people close to you is a great way to explore new technology without all the pressures or time commitment of starting a full - fledged side project.


You're setting the bar way too high.


How're you going to top that next year? At this rate, in a decade you'll have to build a Taj Mahal.

Keep expectations low, stick to ye olde chocolates and roses.


I made my wife a blog / marketing page for her business a few weeks ago as her 'early' valentines day present. The domain name was $13 or so, and using s3 (it's a static generated site) is basically free for how small it is. I decided not to pay 0.50/month for route53 apex support - www. is fine. No SSL.

I'm a backend programmer, but it was fun to learn bootstrap 3 and put something together, and run it through google pagespeed :-). It was a good week of effort, along with helping her learn markdown.


That's really sweet.

I've always been envious of my talented artist friend who does portraits for girls he's dating. Seems like a good way to save money on gifts :p


> Seems like a good way to save money on gifts

Yeah, it's never about the cost though, and always about the thought... that's hard for me, even after 10 years together....women have a life-long maintenance schedule (romantic and respectful gestures).

For you young guys dating: "great Apache warrior always mysterious and never talks about his many ponies". That means don't try to buy a good woman (or brag); they're not for sale. You want to be with someone who's just happy to be with you, even if it's for a free jazz concert. "Is she part of the crew, or part of the cargo?"

I could go on, and on, and on... it's all from "The System" in case you were wondering. There are good women out there, so good luck to all of us finding (and keeping) them.


This is a fun thing to do. A couple years ago on Valentine's Day I learned a little Canvas to make this for my wife: http://oinksoft.com/valentines-day/


This is very much less romantic:

  function drawHeart(ctx, x, y) {
        x += 100;
        y += 100;

        ctx.beginPath();
        ctx.moveTo(x, y);
        ctx.quadraticCurveTo(x + 30,  y + 60, x + 80,  y + 100);
        ctx.quadraticCurveTo(x + 130, y + 60, x + 160, y);
        ctx.bezierCurveTo   (x + 200, y - 75, x + 100, y - 90, x + 80, y - 20);
        ctx.bezierCurveTo   (x + 60,  y - 90, x - 40,  y - 75, x, y);
        ctx.fill();
        ctx.closePath();
      }
Good job by the way!


That's really sweet. :3


I've done the website thing before. I am sufficiently bad at UI that it's always come off corny.

So, I made my wife an app this year. I thought it'd be something other people might appreciate, so I polished it into a product and am selling it:

http://valentines2014.upside-down-research.com/


Corn is the fundamental building block of all successful Valentine's Day constructions.


Cute idea, and a very cute way to promote your business. I'd never heard of brace.io and here I am using it!


My wife has wanted an Android tablet for a while now, so I'm getting her a Nexus 7 and writing a custom Valentine's card app on it for her. I think she'll be surprised!


I did this back in the 90s, when we had to actually know HTML to make a website valentine. You kids have it so easy today ;)


You still need to edit HTML to customize your valentine's site on Brace. We just did most of the work. :)


Or you could have had an ecard delivered by hotmail.


One of my friend from college has a similar startup that runs Dropbox-powered websites, 900dpi.com

I think the difference between them and brace.io is that they have a CMS that allows people to edit text visually as opposed in code.


Doesn't seem to work -- setup a site, keep clicking the "Ship Site" button (an odd choice of verbiage), yet, site is still only viewable in "administrator" mode.


(Brace dev here)

Sorry for the inconvenience. I'll look into this. Can you shoot me an email with your site's name? lauri@brace.io

Thanks!


This is well well done! The instructions say the page should refresh. Should it refresh automatically or did I miss read (I had to refresh to make any changes appear)?


Automatic reload not working and getting a lot of "Internal server error. Server unreachable." messages. Maybe getting hit too hard at the moment?


Any chance you can shoot me a screenshot or some debug info to support@brace.io?


sent :)


I can't get the 'next steps' and video tutorial to disappear on the admin page in Chrome, is that intended?


(Brace dev here)

Definitely not intended :) The modal should disappear once you make your first change to the files in Dropbox. If this doesn't work, please shoot me an email lauri@brace.io.

Sorry for the confusion.


Looks fun but wouldn't work for me. Dropbox issues apparently. Rate limiting maybe?


Sorry about that! I see a few "over quota" errors. Do you have space in your dropbox?


(1) The API request page on dropbox's website hung after clicking "allow." After I received a "no response error," I refreshed and things started working as expected.

(2) Once I received the "Creating new website" prompt, I could see files added to my dropbox. Yet I still received an "oops, something went wrong error" on brace.io. Brace.io prompted me to reselect a valentine's URL (I kept the same) and went back to "creating new website" graphic. Failed again. Refreshed.

(3) After #2 failed again following the refresh, I changed the url name after getting the "whoops something went wrong," which sent a POST request containing the old url title instead of the new one. I'm not sure if this is functioning as expected. After that hung for a minute or so, I went to #4.

(4) Finally, I tried the original URL, which prompted me to administer the page at admin.insertvalentineurlhere.brace.io. That works!


Sorry about the hassle. Thanks for the detailed report. The load from this post has revealed some issues on the brace.io account server that we are working hard to correct. Note that production urls for sites created on Brace are hosted separately (S3 and cloudfront), and shouldn't be effected by problems with the brace.io admin / account server.


Looks like that's it!

I don't even use Dropbox. How did it get full? :/


My bet: Shared folders with pictures in there


i made my girlfriend a website (instead of card / flowers / whatever else) for valentine's day in college... made it from scratch and made it rather lovely. It did not go over well.


I know it is cheap but really - what am I paying for?


My phone's auto correct changed GIS to GAS...


I thought revenge porn was frowned upon?


did this about 15 years ago


Awesome! Thanks man


Downright tacky.




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