Show HN: Custom CMS using Node and Backbone for my girlfriend's fashion blog | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Custom CMS using Node and Backbone for my girlfriend's fashion blog

vanillaextract.me

12 pointsmaxmzd_18 comments

Nice project. A couple things I noticed: You're leaking emails and IP addresses of commenters in your source code. There are plenty of dead pages[1] in the index which you could redirect to the home page or just disallow Google to index either via robots.txt or Google Webmaster Tools.

Edit: Skimming through the site I couldn't actually find a single affiliate link from the image labels.

[1] https://www.google.com/#q=site%3Avanillaextract.me+inurl%3At...

Hey, thanks for checking it out!

Where are you seeing the emails and IP addresses of the commenters?

Pretty slick. Can’t wait to see the nuts & bolts of it if you decide to release it.

Two problems I noticed so far:

1) Images are getting cut off from the header in the individual blog posts (I’m using Chrome 36 on OS X)

2) Back button functionality is broken, would be nice to have that working

Thanks!

Did you happen to resize your browser? I notice that some things get janky because of the waypoints after resize. Need to work on that.

I believe I was looking at it full-res at the time - 1920 x 1200 - but resized after and noticed I could see the photos fine when I resized smaller.

Very cool idea for the fashion bloggers. You might even sell this CMS (per client basis) or if you gather a team of web developers - become an agency working with fashion bloggers.

There is some potentially good money in this.

Yeah, lots of opportunity here for sure. One thing I've been getting good feedback on from some fashion bloggers is the "shop the look" feature on each photo. Affiliate links is how many fashion bloggers monetize.

Have you used a plugin to do that or is it custom? Since you can make a plugin out of that and sell it

I wrote custom Backbone.js views and subviews to handle the shop tags. But you're right, this would be an awesome WordPress plugin. The affiliate network RewardStyle has something similar, but it's lacking a few things, which is why I wrote my own.

Site looks great, but do you have any peeks into the actual CMS? Would love to see!

Thanks! And not yet, but I'm working on a blog post to show it off a bit more.

very very cool ! Can you point to some links that you used to learn node, backbone.. what do you use for layout design ?

Thanks!

I learned Node.js by watch some of Pedro Teixeira's screencasts: http://nodetuts.com/

I'm using Express.js as the backend framework and read some tutorials on that. Can't remember which ones.

I learned Backbone.js by reading the docs: http://backbonejs.org/ along with reading source code of projects I was familiar with.

This best practices article came in handy too: http://geeks.bizzabo.com/post/83917692143/7-battle-tested-ba...

For layout design, I tend to sketch my UX ideas on paper. For this site, since it's so minimal, I designed straight in the browser using HTML / CSS (SASS)

Is it open source?

No, I wrote it solely for the purpose of this blog, but I wouldn't mind open sourcing it after I add a couple more things to the admin panel (if there's interest).

I think there is interest :). Btw how do we access the admin?

Cool, good to hear! I will push towards it. Admin panel is located at a hidden URL right now. There are no user accounts yet, just a single, protected resource with a private key. That's one of the things I need to add.

looks amazing!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com