Show HN: LetterSource - Sharing letters to legislators
I built this site to facilitate sharing of letters. I know it has a very rough and bootstrap-heavy look; I'm meeting up with a close friend of mine this week and he will help me clean it up. I'm kind-of excited about it and wanted to show it off and get some feedback on it while it's still in a pre-release stage (and maybe get a couple letters to seed it before releasing it to the public).
The basic premise is the ability to put a letter on the site (and in the public domain), and others can enter their address and it'll find legislators (federal only at the moment but users can add addresses and if they choose to share the address, it will also show up based on state or zip code). The site will then give you the option to download a formatted PDF with your address and their address already filled in.
For those not wanting to enter their address, the letter can be copied from the page, downloaded as text, html, or docx (docx is experimental and not perfect yet).
To geek-out a little:
* There are no cookies set on the site. The few administrative tasks and the chain-of-custody during letter creation is handled via randomized tokens and HMACs.
* I'm using redis heavily to cache pages (for 10 min) and the statistics. (Thanks antirez! I use it every chance I get. It's a powerful hammer.)
* It's built in PHP using the Kohana 3 framework along with many plugins including mustache and modified SecurImage.
* I'm currently using MySQL geospacial searching for zipcodes, but am planning on taking the Census shapefiles and importing them into PostGIS and just migrating to Postgres for everything. I haven't used Postgres yet, so it'll be a fun migration.
Any comments, questions, and/or critiques would be gladly accepted.