Featured App: Geeky Reads
For the first AppHarbor featured website, we have Geeky Reads, built by Aaron Stannard. Aaron works as Startup Developer Evangelist for Microsoft in Santa Monica. We've asked Aaron a few questions about Geeky Reads and about how the site came about.
What is Geeky Reads?
Geeky Reads is a really simple iGoogle-style feed reader which features technical news for geeks and hackers like me. Currently all of the content is static from a list of feeds that I picked myself, but I plan on making it more dynamic and allowing users to customize it and recommend new feeds.
How many users do you have?
I have only a small number of readers, and I'm not sure what the active number is - probably under 100 users. The project was really meant to be just a demo for Quick and Dirty Feed Parser, an open source project that I coordinate, but I've had so much fun developing Geeky Reads on AppHarbor that I'm considering turning it into a much larger project.
Why did you choose AppHarbor?
I chose AppHarbor because I was already using Git as my source control mechanism for Geeky Reads, and I had just recently had a nasty experience trying to upgrade my blog which is hosted on DiscountASP.NET, my shared host of choice before I started using AppHarbor.
AppHarbor seemed like it would be really easy to use and I liked the idea of just being able to push directly from the Git bash instead of having to use FileZilla or the WebDeploy tool in Visual Studio.
Which technologies is Geeky Reads built on?
How has AppHarbor worked for you so far?
It's been great - it's really easy to push new builds (or roll back to old ones when I screw something up) and the response times have been very high when I've demonstrated Geeky Reads to my friends and potential new users.
What did you like the best? Where could we improve?
Other than the Git build system, I really like how easy the A record setup is for pointing domains to AppHarbor. It's very clean and simple - it would be very tough for me to screw that up with AppHarbor.
One thing I'd like to see is the ability to deploy multiple instances of my app - I don't need that feature now but that's something I expect I'll need if the service takes off. I'd also like to get MS Test up and running as a viable unit testing option for AppHarbor, but I'm fine just using NUnit in the meantime.
Do you think we should feature your app on the blog? Drop us a line at [email protected].