A Thousand Words

“A Thousand Words” was a community site where users post short stories inspired by user-submitted pictures. I made for my wife, but it never took off. It should be fully functional, but it was written a long time ago so the quality of the code is probably somewhat lacking.

Development

The development of the site was detailed in a series of blog posts:

1. a thousand words: A New Timesink has Arrived!
2. a thousand words: First Sketches
3. a thousand words: GETting and POSTing
4. a thousand words: Hot Profilin’ Action
5. a thousand words: Alpha, Beta
6. a thousand words: Finishing Touches

Install on Heroku

• Set up a MySQL database somewhere
• Run:

    git clone https://github.com/ianrenton/athousandwords.git
    cd athousandwords
    cp sample.env .env

• Edit .env in your favourite editor
• Run:

    heroku apps:create
    heroku config:push

Since Heroku is read-only, uploading pictures involves adding them to the repo, committing it and pushing it. It would be nice in future to support automatic upload to Amazon S3 or something.