Like probably many of you, I’m kind of a perfectionist coder/creator. Recently I’d been bookmarking interesting dark mode sites just because I liked their aesthetic, and because for some of the SaaS I want to make, I wanted to make it dark mode first rather than light mode like most sites, so I was looking for inspiration. I’d amassed around 20-30 and I told my friends about these cool sites yesterday. They mentioned that me linking to each one was kind of annoying and they wanted to see all of them at once, similar to how Awwwards and other web design inspiration directories worked. I thought a making a dark mode directory was a great idea as I could just link one site to my friends rather than bombarding them with links. I’d previously worked on other projects but I always spent too long nitpicking every detail. It always took so long that I lost interest after a while and the project was abandoned, or I overengineered the site so much that I didn’t even get to the actual app functionality. People say to build an MVP as soon as you can, but for certain people, it can be quite a challenge to constrain yourself. This time I told myself I’d do everything in 24 hours, as it’s not a super complex idea to create. I bought a domain off Google Domains, used Next.js to spin up a React site, and basically converted my bookmarks into a JSON file along with their titles and descriptions. In the React side, I read the JSON file and put the URLs in iframes with another container with the title and description. One tricky part was that many sites block iframes, so what I had to do was save the entire website into its constituent HTML, CSS, and JS, and I displayed that instead in the iframe. Overall, I’m happy that I was able to execute on an idea within only a day of working on it. It’s not a monetized product or anything, simply a directory, but still, it was fun. The site is: https://darkmodes.com (I was surprised that the .com domain was actually available!) Edit: If the link doesn’t work, try https://darkmodes.vercel.app, having some domain issues right now.
Story Published at: October 23, 2022 at 12:51AM
Story Published at: October 23, 2022 at 12:51AM