HN Explorer

Show HN: My first web app - SociaLeaks.com - wikileaks for the social scene

5 points by localhost3000 ↗ HN
Please have a look at www.socialeaks.com and tell me what you think. This is my first adventure in coding (my background is not CS). I started learning rails about a month ago via railstutorial.org. When I finished that, I felt the best way to continue learning would be to just build an app from scratch. I came up with this concept while observing how crazy the world had gone over WikiLeaks. I thought this was a funny idea. I also thought it would be fun to build! So, here I am.

I built this in rails 3 and it is currently living on Heroku. It took me about two weeks to code, doing just about everything for the first time. If you were to look at the code you could tell the sequence in which I did things by how ugly it is :). It was definitely hard work but, as a learning process, it was absolutely worth the effort. My knowledge prior to this experiment was limited to HTML and CSS, I am now comfortable reading and writing rails code (though I find every day I have so much to learn!).

I do not know whether i will develop this further as it was really just a means to prepare me to work on some other (maybe commercially viable) projects. In any event, it would be cool to add rebuttals, email alerts, more ways to view and rank leaks (and people). What suggests would you have? If you spot a bug please let me know?

Thanks a ton. And many thanks to the folks in #rubyonrails for answering dozens of my really naive questions :)

6 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] thread
smoody
I tend to avoid using Facebook sign-ins for sites if they want permission to post to my wall. I think sites should explain what and when they post. For example, your site could post things like "Joe just signed-up for SocialLeaks where he can tell secrets about his friends!" (bad) or "Joe just leaked some juicy information about Nancy!" (also bad). So, out of curiosity, what do you post on people's walls?
localhost3000
oh good point. it doesn't post anything to fb walls unless you tell it to. i should def make that clear. thx!
sammville
I agree with smooody! you can't just ask for permission when i have no idea what the site does.
localhost3000
added some explanation to the landing page. thx!
veb
A site about secrets, with a Facebook Connect? lol

Although, congratulations on actually learning a programming language and finishing something!

dope2006
it looks good so far, and the idea is really good and intresting.. however do you also run socialeak.com? as this seems to be very similar but has content and more information and details? maybe you should link them togther if you own both?keep up the good work but i agree with whats been said about the facebook connect you need to explain why you need to sign in so people feel safe.