stackselect.tech

That was a little harder than expected!

I've implemented search (see here https://stackselect.tech for it working).

I'm using the free plan of Algolia for now, which I hope will be enough for the small amount of traffic it's currently getting.

In fact, traffic dropped a little because most of my traffic comes from me posting here, and I haven't been posting as much because it's been a little hard.

My first iteration worked, but the UX was horrendous. Loading the icons for each service resulted in a huge number of slow requests and lots of flashes of images loading in one by one. Not good enough!

I implemented extra logic to convert each icon into a data uri (compressed to be extra quick, and fit the free plan) so now for each icon there's 0 extra requests.

I'm pretty happy with it. Tell me what you think, does it work for you? Is it snappy?

What can't you find?

So I know it's a small number, and on its own it doesn't mean much, but my first view was on the 29th April, a few weeks back.

Now, it's up to 554 page views (from 261 visitors). All the analytics are public at https://simpleanalytics.com/stackselect.tech . As you can see, a lot of that traffic is from IndieHackers like you!

A very small win, but I'll take it!

I've been making stackselect.tech much more useful for finding the next part of your tech stack.

I've added direct links to the most useful pages of a tool's website, like their pricing and documentation pages, or articles elsewhere online.

An example with a few links is Render:
https://stackselect.tech/tools/render

I've also added a bit of a review / case study article on Render, and I'm going to do the same for other tools I'm familiar with as a sort of long-form content which is a bit more informative compared to just links.

https://stackselect.tech/articles/under-the-hood/deploying-symfony-app-in-docker-on-render

I've also got a system for auto-generated social images (like the one below) - since I'm not great at design, I'm super-pleased with these!

https://stackselect.tech is now live - it's very alpha!

It's a Symfony app with a static SQLite database that I commit to the project. I sync data from Airtable as a CMS of sorts.

With a quick Dockerfile it's deployed to render.com without any fuss or servers to deal with.

Feel free to take a look, suggestions welcome! Or if you want to know more about how it hangs together I'll be more than happy to share.

It's almost ready to show off, with a few little bits of polish to add.

But it works, it's deployed, and I'm pretty happy with this first attempt!

I'm going to show it on IH soon, and see what feedback, if any, I can get.

I actually bought the domain name after making the prototype this time, unlike the rest of my domain graveyard.