One thing I’ve really enjoyed about freelancing is the freedom to work on pet projects. When I have not been working with my paying clients, these projects have kept me busy. The trouble is, I seem to have many — twenty at the last count — in a perpetual state of “in progress”.
So, today I had some free time and set myself a challenge — develop and launch a useful web app in 24 hours. I decided to develop a browser for professionally-designed WordPress themes.
This challenge also allowed me to play around with some new technologies. In this case, I chose to use jQuery Masonry for the front-end Pinterest-like display.
The app consists of two main parts:
1. A feed processing script that pulls in popular theme information from Mojo Themes and ThemeForest and saves them into a DB. This script is run via cron to update the themes on a weekly basis.
2. Some frontend logic that pulls out these themes and displays a preview graphic for users to click on.
In the end, I spent around eight hours on the development.
I registered a domain name, set up the hosting, added Google Analytics and affiliate referral codes and uploaded the files. The site can be found here:
It’s been a fun day, and I’ll be very interested to hear if the site is useful to anyone!
Glen Scott
I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.
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Might well be useful to me 😀