28 April 2009
Introducing Tipster – Your web tips in 140 words or less
A couple of weeks ago Ryan and I sat down to talk about the upcoming FOWA Tour and how we might spread the word about it a little wider. In the end we thought that instead of buying an ad or blabbing about the event we would build a little web app for web developers and designers. Somehow I ended up agreeing to the job!
What is Tipster?
Tipster is a simple app built by me with the help of Django that has the aim of helping web developers and designers share their tips in 140 words or less. We thought it might be fun to limit the number of words, after all we all seem to like the brevity of Twitter.
We launched the site quietly last week and over the weekend I cleaned up some elements that weren’t working too well and fixed a few bugs. Feedback also provided a lot of great improvement ideas, especially around for the “Hot Tips” section which currently only displays the most popular tips.
Time wise I spent about the equivalent of three work days on the code, HTML and CSS so am pretty pleased with the result. Thanks go to Mike who despite being extremely busy found time to knock up the logo and offer his design eye here and there.
What’s in it for you?
Obviously we would love you to submit your tips to the site. It’s really easy and you don’t need to register to get involved, simply complete the form and submit your tip. All entries are currently moderated but we are checking for new ones regularly.
We are also planning on displaying some of the popular tips during the breaks on the FOWA Tour and are considering piping them through to Think Vitamin as well. All submitters will be linked up so it’s a great opportunity to show off and get some link love.
Feedback
Let us know what you think in the comments and you can of course follow Tipster on Twitter.
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mike kus
# April 28, 2009 - 3:32 pm
it’s only me – nice one bud :)
Paul Randall
# April 28, 2009 - 4:50 pm
It sounds like a great concept. I have tended to add #csstip or #php when doing something similar in Twitter, but this allows a lot more detail to be included.
Keep up the imaginative work!
Ryan
# April 28, 2009 - 4:57 pm
Thanks Paul!
kamrul
# April 29, 2009 - 5:34 am
Hmmm great concept surely. It seems to be very helpful.
Micheil
# May 2, 2009 - 12:22 pm
Hey, great work guys, another very useful mini application. I’ve been learning a fair few good tips and tricks through it about various different topics, one piece of feedback I do have, is that when you’ve got a horizontal scrollbar in firefox (when your viewport is too small), after clicking “vote”, the page will actually scroll left, hence making the site look broken, until you notice the horizontal scrolling. That’s a small quirk, and should be rather easy to fix.
On a different note, are there any plans for a desktop version of tipster? Or a twitter style alert, so if you could signup to tipster, you could choose which tips to receive notification about through a direct message when one got added…
It might be a cool feature to look at, anyway, great work once again, it’s really useful :)
Garden Supplies
# June 8, 2009 - 8:40 am
Certainly one that I’ll be adding to the RSS reader.
Great concept, and I love the cleanliness of the design.
Good work all round.
Melissa Leon
# June 23, 2009 - 4:05 pm
This is a pretty cool little app. Great job Keir!