Show IH: An embeddable portfolio for your (side) projects
Heya Indiehackers!
I’m Armin, co-creator of MakerWidget! It’s a little widget you can put on your project pages to show who you are, where to find you and what you did before.
My partner Melanie and I wanted to make ourselves more visible on our side project pages, so we tried to elaborate on Pieter Levels idea of a maker badge!
You can easily set up your widget on makerwidget.com for free and grab your embed code! It supports multiple makers, custom link lists and a project gallery. Being a team of two makers ourselves, we focused a lot on flexibility! 💪
I ship-streamed the development of this widget on Twitch, and will also be live-streaming all the upcoming features :) You can watch me on shipstreams.com! (And yes, I’m low-key trying to make „ship-streaming“ a thing!) 🚢
Cheers, Armin
Widgets are already embedded here:
- https://threader.app
- https://ericlima.com
- https://builtbyher.io
- https://akshaykadam.me
- https://www.growthjobslist.com
- https://www.saasflow.co/
- https://madewithvuejs.com
- https://joblist.app
Also, we have a Gatsby Plugin now:
I love a good widget-based Micro-SaaS. Nice work!
Thanks for the kind words Tyler! Love Storemappers story (was a big inspiration for years!)
Loved unconventional design. But wants a bit much input 😅
thanks! - yeah it kinda needs the input - guess I need to work on the onboarding process 😊
I like how un-obtrusive the design of this is on any of those examples!
It looks like you can have an agency structure, right? As in, can I have the main headline as a company, and showcase a few of our people underneath that (like the Nifty Software example)?
thanks!
yeah you can customize the button label +images and also main/subheadline of the widget itself
also the list-accordions (title and link+icon) - have seen very creative uses :)
like just „curated by xx“ on a link-blog or „my portfolio“ on a personal site - 😊
Could be nice to include the MakerWidget on my website builder platform Table2Site. Can it be done by including some js?
did you have time to check out the site? I'd love to get your feedback 😊
The website is awesome :-) Clear, modern, to-the-point. That's perfect in my book! :-)
thank you!! 😁
oh! that would be awesome :) - its just an embed code like this one: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nzem9nrcj36d2el/Screenshot 2018-10-12 16.00.08.png?dl=0
I love my maker widget. Gotta give it to you and your last few projects, they've been really on point.
I found myself using this one and the Social Share Preview by Melanie.
ohh thank you! 😍
(of course, @feloidea has also designed/concepted MakerWidget 😃)
Hey Armin - I love this idea & it was really easy to set up!
I just added the widget to techjobsforgood.com
very cool! please give me any feedback (or ideas for extensions) you might have 😀
Hey Armin! Congrats on the launch. I have actually been building something very similar but related to product reviews! I would be very interested in learning more about the process of building your app. What is your stack?
You mention you ship-streamed the development. Do you have a twitch archive link handy :) ?
Hey Scott!
I built it with Laravel + Vue.js - I have yet to upload the videos again, my iMac Kernel paniced which corrupted the video files; werent able to recover them yet.
But if you have specific questions just come at me :)
Ahh no that's not good! Well if you are able to recover at some point let me know! Currently I have a working prototype built using WP Rest API(I know 🙈) and Vue.js but would love to move to Laravel for a more custom solution.
Tested out the process of adding projects on MakerWidget and it's exactly how I envisioned my project haha. Wish I'd been about for the stream!
Are you using JSON endpoints from Laravel to spit of the data into the widget page?
What's your thoughts on bandwidth? Say your widget was embedded into a site with large traffic, how do you deal with the extra data loading it via iframe? Especially if there's a free plan too.
Build with what you're comfortable 😊
Data in Widget Page
No - the Widget itself is rendered 100% on the server side! (currently, im also injecting the js/css/svgs to keep request rate low)
Bandwidth
I render the Widgets server-side, so I can generate static HTML Files in future out of them - then you can cut on server-load :)
For now, it's running on a $10 Digitalocean droplet and it's doing fine; (biggest consumer is my own Page https://madewithvuejs.com w 250k Pageviews a month)
IF there is a huge one coming, I have to decline or (more likely) get a CDN and host static stuff there cheap :)
Indeed! I am just going ahead with WP. With the REST api it's completely decoupled from my widget anyway :)
I see! I've ended up going REST -> VueJS app -> iframe on clients site. Iframes are fun to work with aren't they? 😭
Nice to know your bandwidth is working nicely and great idea converting it static! I think I'll follow suit and monitor bandwidth. If they are destroying it, then I'll ask to upgrade or work out a better caching solution.
Thanks for the response!
np!
Tell me when you launch it, want to add it to https://madewithvuejs.com 😃
Hey @arminulrich ! Just came to drop in that I am nearly ready to launch my app - http://reviewdrop.io (Ended up learning/building it with Laravel :) wasn't as bad as I thought coming from PHP/WP) The widget itself is made with VueJS on the bottom right of the landing page. Thanks' so much for the inspiration to move to Laravel!
Will do mate!