donpinkus

It's slightly less easy to read than <li ng-each={myList}>...</li>

But it means you don't have to learn a library's HTML API.

Or when you want to loop through myList, but exclude a few particular items... you know how to write that in JS, but have no idea what to do in the mark up language. You could create a filteredList, but it's often not ideal

So, can I use React as my company's front end framework or not?

If I do use React, what is the specific legal risk (if any)?

PLEASE no emotionally charged comments - I just want a clear answer from someone who deeply understands the legal stuff.

Meh, it's more just disrupting premarital pregnancy prevention.

Premarital sex has been huge since the invention of marriage, really hard to disrupt something that established. Denial is a pretty good app for it, try downloading that?

And yea this is a solid disruption to immorality, you're right! Now a person can get the medical care they need, even when local doctors would want to deny it based on their own religious beliefs.

It's meant to make the functions built on Blockspring usable in more places - so that's how it's part of our core value.

(by the way, long time no see - hope you've been well!)

They upped the limit from 400,000 cells - I think it's around 2M now, will try to find the source

Thanks! Nice observation :)

nice. who wants to fork this for Rails? :P

That's a really good question.

I haven't hit a limit yet and tested with 200 queries / minute.

Will update this comment when I find that out.

Yea seriously...

I thought of it since a buddy has some Tiki Bar that he wanted a site for, and I really didn't want to drop into WordPress or anything serious. Knew he could handle a spreadsheet.

Checkout http://www.tarbell.io/ - It's a CMS designed around google sheets. I think it's a bit of setup, but might be a solid solution.

It's an interesting idea - here are some issues to consider:

1. Joining data will be very slow. If you need to access 500 database to get the "comments" on a "post", you're going to have issues.

2. How will you change the database structure as you iterate?

3. Storage cost of data is so low, that by the time you would start paying for data, you would have greatly exceeded the capabilities of Google Sheets.

4. Google sheets are slower than databases - there are no indexes, keys, the data is not stored in a way meant for most db operations (selections, etc)

I'm sure theres more but these seem to be the biggest ones for me.

That said, you should definitely try it - it's an interesting project at the very least.

Thanks! Yea I was trying to use Google Spreadsheet, getting annoyed with the JSONP and the goofy way they returned their JSON, so figured I'd just wrap it in something easier to use...

What "availability issues" did you run into? I haven't noticed any with my sheets yet

As we find out about different use-cases, we like to post articles that explains how we solve that use case.

Other posts were about the general use of Blockspring. This post is specifically about how we created R Forecasting as a service.

Wait what? Where did we reference it I didn't even notice it :P

Truth is most people's APIs really cost us nothing to run, so we'd rather not charge for it :P

I'm a really big believer in sites that provide a ton of utility for free, and only charge you when you're actually costing the company something.

That said if you do want to use a ton of CPU, that gets expensive for us - so we may make paid accounts for people that use CPU heavy API's. We realized Blockspring would still be a lot cheaper than keeping your own EC2 server up all the time, so that's sorta cool!

Also if you wanted it set-up locally at your company and 24/7 phone support (from the two of us), we'd have a paid account to cover our time.

Obviously if you have ideas let us know!

Hey dheera that's super interesting. Since it's about web scraping specifically, I bet the guys over at Kimonolabs.com would be the experts on that!

Or if someone on here knows how to do this, and wants to throw up an API on Blockspring for it, we'd all love it :)

We could totally let people import a gist and instantly API it.

Do you have example gists you've want API'd? We could take a look tonight about how to implement this

I needed to do screenshots in my Rails app, and I couldn't get the screen shotting service to work in Ruby.

I already knew how to do screenshots in Python, and was tired of relearning this stuff in a different language for each project.

So I made an API that takes a screenshot, and now I don't need to learn it ever again :)

https://api.blockspring.com/users/mapsup/blocks/07b6410853fa...

Different incubators have different focuses. If you need something one of these incubators focuses on, it can be extremely helpful. If you don't need it, then it is a waste of time and your company's equity.

Some incubators focus on teaching you how to market your product (TechStars, 500 startups).

Some incubators focus more on just hooking you up with top advice while giving you no structured program (Y Combinator).

Many really only provide an investor network.

Some startups need an incubator because they need help with one of the above things. Some startups are just fine without it.

If you're having fun just bootstrapping scrape.ly, then just continue with that! If at some point you're thinking "damn I wish I had some people that really knew how early startups worked and could give me advice on _____" then an incubator is helpful.

tl;dr - they don't magically make you grow and you don't always need one. Incubators can provide advice on specific topics due to their experience, and often get you in contact investors.

BTW, is scrape.ly different from kimonolabs's product? Either way, good luck and keep at it!!

Is a non-engineer able to understand this?

Where would you actually host the webapp? Would you set up a new server on your intranet and share a link to it?

Thanks bnejad! Overall, what did you think of it?

Got it - just updated some language in our blog post since this was clearly confusing :)

Also added a link to the main page.

When an engineer does all that code, it gets posted to the front page of blockspring.com. That front-page definitely does not require code to use.

Thanks for pointing this out

Hmm, so maybe our blogpost was unclear about that.

The BlockSpring library just lets people post their own work onto the BlockSpring home page (www.blockspring.com).

Our library just lets you specify variables in your code that a user should be able to input. Then when you push it to BlockSpring, we generate a forms and other inputs so users can change these variables.

Truth is the BlockSpring library works just as well with non-visualizations. We just figured it was more obvious to have people changing colors in a graph, then adjusting some other input in a js script.

Does that make sense? We're still working on how to phrase this idea :)