jordanmarshall

It's hard to know exactly what you mean by "simple", but I'm fairly sure you want to avoid any frameworks, as those tend to have a learning curve, even for the easiest ones. Same goes for build tools like Webpack, which I still have trouble with after years of use.

For CSS I see a lot of recommendations for "classless" libraries, which I've never tried, but could be good if you don't need to do much tinkering. For just a little bit more time investment you can get a lot more options with something like Bootstrap. It's pretty easy to learn, has a lot of "drag and drop" style components, and there are tons of templates out there (free and premium). I learned it once many years ago and have been using it for projects ever since.

On the interactivity side it really depends on what your needs are, but if you don't need too many bells and whistles you could probably get by with vanilla Javascript. jQuery is also a good choice for simple applications, as it offers a slightly more intuitive interface to some of the basic JS actions.

All of this being said, if you think you will be spending a lot of time on the frontend, or have complex interactivity needs, it might be worth it to learn a framework. I can recommend Vue as one that is fairly easy to get started with and also scalable to larger applications.

Lexia Learning | Senior Software Engineer | Full-time | Remote | USA Lexia Learning is the structured literacy expert. For over 35 years, the company has focused solely on literacy, and today, provides a full spectrum of solutions for both students and teachers. With robust offerings for differentiated instruction, personalized learning, assessment, and professional learning, Lexia helps more learners read, write, and speak with confidence.

Lexia is an amazing place to work, not only because of the great benefits, but because the work you do plays a key role in helping millions of students learn to read and write.

Currently looking for:

- Senior Backend Engineer (PHP/MySQL preferred)

- Senior Frontend Engineer (AngularJS/Angular preferred)

- Senior Integration Engineer (OAuth, SAML, LDAP experience)

Apply at https://cambiumlearning.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/camb/job/Remot... or email jordan[dot]marshall[at]lexialearning.com w/ a full CV and desired comp range. No recruiters please.

Lexia Learning | Senior Software Engineer | Full-time | Remote | USA

Lexia Learning is the structured literacy expert. For over 35 years, the company has focused solely on literacy, and today, provides a full spectrum of solutions for both students and teachers. With robust offerings for differentiated instruction, personalized learning, assessment, and professional learning, Lexia helps more learners read, write, and speak with confidence.

Lexia is an amazing place to work, not only because of the great benefits, but because the work you do plays a key role in helping millions of students learn to read and write.

Currently looking for:

- Senior Backend Engineer (PHP/MySQL preferred)

- Senior Integration Engineer (OAuth, SAML, LDAP experience)

Apply at https://cambiumlearning.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/camb/job/Remot... or email jordan[dot]marshall[at]lexialearning.com w/ a full CV and desired comp range. No recruiters please.

Help me understand the appeal of NFT art. I love digital art, but I don't see the appeal of spending money to get the token certifying you as the owner. The image/work is still out there and can be viewed/downloaded by other people. You don't even control it, unless the artist agrees to send you all of the files and delete them on his or her system. Your name doesn't even appear next to the piece when people look at it.

Sure, usually the tokens come with a print, and you support the artist, but those are things you can do via other means. What is the NFT adding? It seems only slightly more authentic than "buying" a star from a star registry.

Yes, and still is attempting. He and his climbing partner used the weather window to make another acclimatization rotation up to camp 2. I believe they are at base camp now.

Question for everyone on this thread who went from being (1) a regular caffeine user to (2) completely or mostly abstinent: did you find that you were as or even more mentally productive after you had transitioned off of it?

Similarly, is there anyone who has gone from not using caffeine much (or at all), to using it all the time, and found it to be a positive and sustainable improvement on productivity?

Currently I drink green tea 3-4 days a week and find that its a good balance between getting the benefits while also not building up a huge tolerance.

When you describe it as a "Rotten Tomatoes" style platform, I think of only having a handful of trusted people/experts giving reviews for items (IE established movie critics). It looks like anyone can leave feedback on an item, which is a little different. RT started as (and still is) just an aggregator of movie critics, not a community review site.

As others have pointed out, once you gain traction, fake reviews are going to be a big problem. It seems like the solution to that is moving towards a more "Rotten Tomatoes" style system, where only the established experts give feedback. This might start as having two ratings - "experts" and "community", but I expect you would quickly find the "expert" rating to be much more useful to people.

This is a cool idea, but I'm worried (like a lot of other commenters) that a "rapid fire" approach like this may not work, and could get you banned from a lot of communities. As a developer I need help with marketing, but I also don't want to spam a bunch of communities (especially ones I use, like HN).

I would definitely put more information about (1) The messaging you are using, (2) who you post as (do you post as the owner?), and (3) the directories you submit to (it looks like all 160, but further comments seem to indicate that it's a subset).

I wonder if it would be more valuable to find a good messaging formula for a few specific communities, and post things that way? I would be much more interested in a service that not only posts, but also follows comment threads and answers questions. Thats probably a more premium offering, but worth considering.

HackerNews is listed as one of the directories. When I submitted my project (soon to be startup) I got a ton of support and advice, it was invaluable. That being said, I don't think it would have worked if I hadn't made a very personalized message and responded to all the comments.

uigradients is really nice, although they only have linear gradients (which look really good). I created Gradient Magic to highlight the large variety of styles and patterns that are possible.

As far as an API goes, how would you organize the input/output for dynamic backgrounds? Maybe send a style and colors, and get a random gradient of that color?

It depends on a number of factors. Some of the more complex gradients could certainly be larger than some of the SVGs you are using in terms of raw size, but I'm not sure that would affect scrolling. If you link me to your project I would be happy to take a look.

They should work consistently on all modern browsers except IE. As far as performance, they should be "faster" than needing to download external images. In terms of page rendering performance, I'm not completely sure. They might take more rendering time, but I've never noticed it, and it's certainly going to be faster than download time for an image (even a small one).

Yeah, thats my concern with subscriptions as well. I'm not sure many people would need to come back that often. Maybe more premium features (like what you highlight below) would work? Instead of just being a hub for gradients, it becomes your first stop anytime you need a cool image.

I'd be curious as to what other non-css formats would be helpful. You mention Flutter LinearGradient, are there others? SVG certainly, is there a way to make images export friendly for Sketch or Figma?

I looked into it before, and I don't think html2canvas would work. IIRC the only way to get the gradients was using the screen capture API [1], which works, but requires users to click an authorization prompt before use.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt...

Great idea! I've considered adding an option to download individual gradients as an image, but I haven't thought about that as the primary focus. Certainly the number of people interested in cool backgrounds is going to be much larger than the current audience of frontend web developers.

The cool thing is that the two target audiences aren't mutually exclusive. So long as I continue to build out the images in CSS, I can offer both image and CSS download options.

Hey HN! GradientMagic is a side project that I launched roughly a year ago. It’s a large gallery of unique CSS gradients. You can browse the different patterns and copy the CSS with a single click, no login required. CSS gradients are often preferable to images since they are usually much smaller and easier to manage.

I would love any feedback or improvement ideas, but my real question is this: is it worth my time to try and monetize it? I’ve considered two approaches: (1) selling premium content bundles (2) subscription based approach w/ access to premium content and advanced features. I like (1) because it would be easier to implement. I like (2) because there is more value I can offer through advanced tools.

For reference, I get about 100 visitors a day right now with almost no marketing and very few updates (lately).

Agreed! After all, look where we are posting :)

What I was trying to say, but didn't have the space to fully articulate, was that it can look a little noisy and random at first glance. As I write this some of the top threads include posts about replacing a toilet valve, herbicide use, and motivating a son in law. Once you filter through some of this though there are a lot of really smart people giving pretty good financial advice.

Just skimming some of the replies here makes me think you will get better advice on the Bogleheads forum [1]. Despite the minimalist appearance it is actually a great place to get sensible financial advice. I would start with the wiki page on managing a windfall [2], then search through older replies to similar questions. This kind of question gets asked there a lot, so there should be some recent threads.

[1] https://www.bogleheads.org/ [2] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Managing_a_windfall

Another +1 recommendation for the book and related videos. While it has not been a silver bullet (nothing is), it has given me a lot of helpful tools to improve my designs. The book does a good job of filling the "design for engineers" gap that I have observed while trying to find good resources on web design.