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Projects

When you’re beat, you’re beat

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Last week I wrote about my fun little weekend project for Semantic UI. Well it turns out I wasn’t the only person to have this bright idea.

I released builtwithsemanticui on January 25th, and he released builtwithsemantic on January 27th. The big difference, though, was that he reached out to the Semantic UI author immediately, while I decided to wait and never had the chance to.

Well, speed kills, my friends. The author loved the idea and decided to put it in the readme and docs. In other words, it became officially endorsed. Which doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for my site, builtwithsemanticui, now does it?

So I did the only thing I think the nice, friendly, open source community would want me to do. I reached out to the owner of builtwithsemantic and offered to give him my domain for free and have it point to his site. This also avoids any confusion for users who aren’t sure which is the “official” showcase site. And I will add all the sites that were on builtwithsemanticui over to builtwithsemantic and then proceed to delete the builtwithsemanticui tumblr. *tear* [note: I have yet to hear from the owner of builtwithsemantic after reaching out to him a week ago. I will follow up again]

Ah well, you win some and you lose some. No worries. Part of the process is knowing when you’re beat (and when to fight). Besides, builtwithsemantic is better and has way more potential, so it deserves to be officially endorsed. Onwards to bigger and better things.

Business, Design, Projects

Where Ideas Come From. A Fun Weekend Project

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A few weeks ago I was catching up on my nightly Hacker News readings when I came across a thread about passive income. There were a bunch of really useful comments in there with people detailing their side projects that have either generated them some income or are on their way. There was one user in particular that caught my eye, simonhamp.

He detailed his side project, builtwithbootstrap, that helps him passively generate 4 figures/month using only tumblr. And since everything is hosted on tumblr, his costs are negligible. To me, that’s amazing. What’s even cooler is that he was nice enough to lay out exactly how he did it. You know the saying, good artists copy, but great artists steal. Especially when they give you the keys to the lock.

So that’s exactly what I did. I’ve been working with a UI toolkit called Semantic UI that I think is super fabulous, and it hasn’t even reached version 1 yet. You know what comes next. The next day after reading the HN thread, I bought the domain builtwithsemanticui.com. Then I spent about 5 hrs on the Saturday to set up tumblr, style it with Semantic UI, and find some sites built with Semantic UI. About half of that 5 hrs was spent figuring out how to style tumblr using a semantic ui tumblr theme, which I couldn’t get going fully and eventually gave up on. [Side note: styling in tumblr is a major pain in the ass.] The rest was a step by step process that I followed straight from simonhamp’s advice on the HN thread. It was that easy.

The only part that I had to do even a little bit of thinking (just a little) was where to find Semantic UI built sites. So like anybody who has used the interwebs before, I googled “sites built with semantic ui” – genius! I soon found myself on builtwith.com, a service that let’s you find out what web technologies power which websites. I signed myself up for a free account, and bam, 20 results to get me started.

I guess the question remains – will it take off? Who knows, who cares. 5 hours of work after given a step by step plan to a 4 figure/month passive income stream seems like a pretty easy time investment to me (and yes I know there is more work to do). You might be thinking how I just got lucky. Perhaps, but ask yourself this. How come nobody else took the time to execute the plan? Ideas are cheap. Execution is what’s valuable.

Seriously, ideas are everywhere and smart people are willing to give them away for free. Steal away. This post should give you plenty of ideas. There are tons of frameworks and technology out there. Showcase apps and sites built with them using tumblr. Get on it.