Over two years ago (wow, has it really been that long?) I launched builtwithaurelia a showcase of Aurelia applications and community created offerings for the Aurelia Javascript framework. When I launched I didn’t open source it because I didn’t want the pressure of having to put out something clean and perfect. I hacked this thing together quite quickly and over time slowly grew it to what it is now (sort of complete).
Towards the early part of 2017, I embarked on creating a bunch of quick single-purpose web applications to keep myself busy and sharp. One of those apps was a temporary file storage web application called Tempfile.cloud. The premise was simple: you get 1gb of free upload space and your files have an expiry of 24 hours. I threw some advertisements on there and then shared it around. Surprisingly, it got some traffic. Turns out file sharing sites not covered in malware-laced banner ads/widgets, require you to signup and have no Russian tracking scripts resonate.
For a while I’ve had a great domain name just lying around and it dawned on me what it could be a while ago, so I decided to use seo.fit for a SEO analysis tool that gives you SEO information about a domain and improvements. The purpose seemed fitting for the domain. It’s not an original idea because there are tonnes of these sites around and admittedly, it didn’t take hardly any effort but it’s a step in the right direction for me by actually following through on my side project ideas and launching them.
As a developer, I love Github and use it to not only contain my public and private development projects, but also follow other interesting projects. Sometimes I’ll fork a project if I want to contribute to it or star a repository if I am interested in using it now or later. I joined Github on August 18, 2010 so I have been an active member of Github for seven years now.
I know, I said another side project would be coming in February, but I have created another quick little Aurelia side project for January. Introducing tempfile.cloud a temporary file storage service using Aurelia, Node.js and Amazon S3. I find most free temporary file services are horrible, the limits are too small and they’re littered with inappropriate ads and pop up windows that tell you that your machine is infected. I wanted a simple way to share files that didn’t require Dropbox or a dodgy third party service. The site does have ads, but only two of them in the sidebar (quite unobtrusive).
I’ve made it a kind of New Years Resolution to build little silly, niche apps in 2017 and onwards. And doing what I said I would do, I have built something silly for January. My first app is a band name generator called namemyband.net. The premise is simple, you get a random band name. If you’re not happy with it, you click the blue link to get another. It’s not perfect, but it was a quick app built using Aurelia (did you expect anything less).