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Comment by donpinkus | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

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I'm on the same page as the parent comment. It literally looks like any other Javascript graph framework.

There seems to be no additional tools added to make it intuitive for non engineers. You want them to run web servers, save text documents and edit JSON markup. Not a single one of my non engineering coworkers would ever make it through this on their own. Further, if they make a mistake in the JSON syntax they're going to be ruined. Absolutely no chance that they figure out what's wrong. JSON syntax is pretty straightforward for engineers, but others aren't going to understand the requirement of quotes, escaping, etc. The JSON markup has a ton of parameters that aren't explained and aren't super obvious.

I understand what you're trying to provide by what you've just stated, but this product definitely isn't that, unfortunately.

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

You've completely missed the point. The site is for developers who make visualisations to be able to allow users to use the visualisations with their own data. It requires you to first create the vis code, then use the Blockspring API to wrap the data source, then the website auto-generates a data upload form that populates the plot.

As someone unfamiliar with the product entirely, this point was very non-obvious. Especially since nothing on the original page linked to the main ui.

Blahah got it right! Sorry but it's our bad. We're updating the post right now to clarify.

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