methochris

thanks for the insight. i am not starting entirely from scratch but i have no actual product/users to speak of. just a few ideas, a few months worth of savings, and a good bit of boilerplate code from my training projects.

I struggled with this question myself recently. I had minor experience with PHP a long ways back so starting my app with something familiar sounded better than starting from scratch.

But after a ton of research, I came to the conclusion that learning to program/mvc/security techniques with php is total chaos. There is 10+ years of php tutorials out there and everyone of them takes a different approach to there programming methods and u have no idea if your adopting the habits of a guru or some punk who just figured out his first script. There are so many php functions that do the same thing (mysql vs msqli), u will struggle constantly just figuring out what the the right/best/newest way to do things is. It's all such a mess...

So I ended up taking the 101 udacity.com course and learned the basics of python/programming in really short order. After that I did the 253 web dev class there with Steve Huffman (creator of reddit). After that I fealt like I had a solid understanding of how mondern web apps are put together and I learned from some real pros.

I immediately picked up Flask, got set up on heroku, and have been having a blast ever since. Flask is especially nice because there are plugins/defaults/documentation on handling and avoiding most modern web app features/security issues. I highly recommend this route.

Good luck!

Launching may be the only way for real data but how does one find out if an idea is even worth putting the time into? Other people talk about all this testing they do and pre-signups... Are they just aquiring these people through search results/real world marketing/agencies?

Wise words.

My family has been supportive over the past 14 months while I mapped this thing out, learned to program, design it, etc.

It's just at a point now where I have to chose leaving my day job to make the site my day job and its too risky without at least throwing the idea out there first to see if there's any response.

Thanks!

Ya...I am trying. I think the responsiveness is a huge selling point and that's like building 6 different sites at once, so the going is slow. I'm alone and only have 2 days a week to commit. Now that I learned how to program enough to get it functional, things are speeding up.

Was just hoping for a little validation that maybe someone in a vacuum thinks it'd be neat.

sorry to hear...

is working from my comp and phone. please check back tomorrow if you can, i wonder if it's a DNS thing or launchrock doesn't like iPhones.

Responsive (zurb foundation), taught myself to program (udacity), built to scale (flask/heroku/memcached/redis). Solo founder/designer/programmer. This has been a long time coming (idea- education-buildtime-launch = 14+ months). I built the website I believe the world needs right now and exactly the way I always imagined the perfect "local/social/mobile" network. Just set "where & who" and your at an open forum with threaded conversations, voting, and community managed "sticky" links. Mute the users you don't want to see, post anonymous jots to protect your identity, quickly toggle muted/anonymous users, "watch" area/groups to quickly jump between favorites and set notification settings for each, wave and send private messages to other pinjot users, view board statistics and determine if its worth a flat-rate "pin'd jot" to get your message out to a wide audience of interested viewers. Earn points and badges as the pinjot community "thumbs up"'s your jots and rate their experiences with you.

Communication with any group in any geographic area will soon be possible!