jordanmarshall

Joined 12 years ago

Karma
334
Submissions
22
Member since
Mar 20
Software Engineer

Projects and Blog: www.jormars.com

Lately: www.gradientmagic.com

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Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
It's hard to know exactly what you mean by "simple", but I'm fairly sure you want to avoid any frameworks, as those tend to have a learning curve, even for the easiest ones. Same goes for build tools like Webpack, which I still have trouble with after years of use.

For CSS I see a lot of recommendations for "classless" libraries, which I've never tried, but could be good if you don't need to do much tinkering. For just a little bit more time investment you can get a lot more options with something like Bootstrap. It's pretty easy to learn, has a lot of "drag and drop" style components, and there are tons of templates out there (free and premium). I learned it once many years ago and have been using it for projects ever since.

On the interactivity side it really depends on what your needs are, but if you don't need too many bells and whistles you could probably get by with vanilla Javascript. jQuery is also a good choice for simple applications, as it offers a slightly more intuitive interface to some of the basic JS actions.

All of this being said, if you think you will be spending a lot of time on the frontend, or have complex interactivity needs, it might be worth it to learn a framework. I can recommend Vue as one that is fairly easy to get started with and also scalable to larger applications.

Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Help me understand the appeal of NFT art. I love digital art, but I don't see the appeal of spending money to get the token certifying you as the owner. The image/work is still out there and can be viewed/downloaded by other people. You don't even control it, unless the artist agrees to send you all of the files and delete them on his or her system. Your name doesn't even appear next to the piece when people look at it.

Sure, usually the tokens come with a print, and you support the artist, but those are things you can do via other means. What is the NFT adding? It seems only slightly more authentic than "buying" a star from a star registry.

Comment · 5 years ago
Yes, and still is attempting. He and his climbing partner used the weather window to make another acclimatization rotation up to camp 2. I believe they are at base camp now.
Comment · 5 years ago
Question for everyone on this thread who went from being (1) a regular caffeine user to (2) completely or mostly abstinent: did you find that you were as or even more mentally productive after you had transitioned off of it?

Similarly, is there anyone who has gone from not using caffeine much (or at all), to using it all the time, and found it to be a positive and sustainable improvement on productivity?

Currently I drink green tea 3-4 days a week and find that its a good balance between getting the benefits while also not building up a huge tolerance.

Comment · 6 years ago
When you describe it as a "Rotten Tomatoes" style platform, I think of only having a handful of trusted people/experts giving reviews for items (IE established movie critics). It looks like anyone can leave feedback on an item, which is a little different. RT started as (and still is) just an aggregator of movie critics, not a community review site.

As others have pointed out, once you gain traction, fake reviews are going to be a big problem. It seems like the solution to that is moving towards a more "Rotten Tomatoes" style system, where only the established experts give feedback. This might start as having two ratings - "experts" and "community", but I expect you would quickly find the "expert" rating to be much more useful to people.

Comment · 6 years ago
This is a cool idea, but I'm worried (like a lot of other commenters) that a "rapid fire" approach like this may not work, and could get you banned from a lot of communities. As a developer I need help with marketing, but I also don't want to spam a bunch of communities (especially ones I use, like HN).

I would definitely put more information about (1) The messaging you are using, (2) who you post as (do you post as the owner?), and (3) the directories you submit to (it looks like all 160, but further comments seem to indicate that it's a subset).

I wonder if it would be more valuable to find a good messaging formula for a few specific communities, and post things that way? I would be much more interested in a service that not only posts, but also follows comment threads and answers questions. Thats probably a more premium offering, but worth considering.

Comment · 6 years ago
HackerNews is listed as one of the directories. When I submitted my project (soon to be startup) I got a ton of support and advice, it was invaluable. That being said, I don't think it would have worked if I hadn't made a very personalized message and responded to all the comments.
Comment · 6 years ago
uigradients is really nice, although they only have linear gradients (which look really good). I created Gradient Magic to highlight the large variety of styles and patterns that are possible.

As far as an API goes, how would you organize the input/output for dynamic backgrounds? Maybe send a style and colors, and get a random gradient of that color?

Comment · 6 years ago
It depends on a number of factors. Some of the more complex gradients could certainly be larger than some of the SVGs you are using in terms of raw size, but I'm not sure that would affect scrolling. If you link me to your project I would be happy to take a look.
Comment · 6 years ago
They should work consistently on all modern browsers except IE. As far as performance, they should be "faster" than needing to download external images. In terms of page rendering performance, I'm not completely sure. They might take more rendering time, but I've never noticed it, and it's certainly going to be faster than download time for an image (even a small one).
Comment · 6 years ago
Yeah, thats my concern with subscriptions as well. I'm not sure many people would need to come back that often. Maybe more premium features (like what you highlight below) would work? Instead of just being a hub for gradients, it becomes your first stop anytime you need a cool image.

I'd be curious as to what other non-css formats would be helpful. You mention Flutter LinearGradient, are there others? SVG certainly, is there a way to make images export friendly for Sketch or Figma?

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Great idea! I've considered adding an option to download individual gradients as an image, but I haven't thought about that as the primary focus. Certainly the number of people interested in cool backgrounds is going to be much larger than the current audience of frontend web developers.

The cool thing is that the two target audiences aren't mutually exclusive. So long as I continue to build out the images in CSS, I can offer both image and CSS download options.

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