Introduction

Welcome to the first update on my journey to creating a link-sharing site. If you are interested in what I am doing and why I am doing it check out the introduction to the series. And if you want to get notified when I post new updates, follow me on Twitter or sign up to my mailing list.

I have prioritised getting something functional. This means that I haven’t exactly created anything beautiful yet. But I’m sure that will be very obvious.

Building the Basics

I broke down my requirements based on the pages and functionality I needed to create to get an MVP (minimum viable product) up and running.

A Page for Consuming

Link-sharing websites are, simply put, a platform for facilitating content consumption. That is, the ‘content creation’ side of this website is limited to a user providing a link and a title. At least for the time being… Furthermore, I expect the majority of users to spend much more time consuming content rather than producing.

Therefore, I need a way for users to find content to consume! This page will probably act as the home page for the site.

My current intention is for this page to simply contain a list of cards where each one contains just the title of the link.

Figure 1: Screenshot of my ‘browsing’ page

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A Page for Producing

Then again, what’s the point in a page for consuming content if there is no content to be consumed! Sounds like I can’t get away with not building a page for submitting links to the site.

So, as I said, I went ahead and made it as minimal as possible.

Figure 2: Screenshot of my ‘submit’ page

Now it’s worth noting that for the time being, that ‘Submit’ button sends the link nowhere. My plan is to hook this up to a database which will contain all of the links on the site.

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Conclusion

That’s all I have for this update. My main priority in upcoming updates will be hooking up the site to use a persistent database to store the links. It has been great fun getting started with this project and I am very excited to see where it can go!

I know that I am new to the concept of ‘sharing your work’ but I know consistency is key so stay tuned for another post coming soon!