[arboc]

I and five other volunteers, with backgrounds in customer relations, UI/UX design+engineering, medicine, digital design and psychology formed a team and created a website in 48 hours during the weekend: https://homenauts.com/

The goal is to inspire people who stay at home during the COVID-19 pandemic and to share tools for making the most of the time.

We did the challenge as part of the the HackCorona hackathon: https://hackcorona.world/ This was my first hackathon and it was an amazing wild ride! I had signed up for it just a couple days before the start date and only got confirmation I was to participate a few hours before kick-off. Going into it I didn’t know if I could do much to help, since I’m a psychologist with a kind of mixed bag of other skills, instead of say a straight-up data analyst or programmer. I feel incredibly lucky to have met the others, who welcomed me and found ways to make use of everyone’s skills. Coining the term “homenauts” is probably my biggest contributions - otherwise I mostly tried to do some research and write content for the website, while the other members collected content, wrote, made illustrations, built front/back-end functionality, acquired the domain... Every time I checked back in there was something new to see. Exhausted, we finished the hackathon in second place out of more than 30 teams and received a lot of positive encouragement for the idea.

We plan to continue work on this project, albeit at a less intense pace. So I and the others would love to hear what ideas you might have for the user content sections, or any other feedback! We all want the project to help our fellow homenauts as much as possible :D You are also very welcome to submit links to be added to the site if you want - in that case, check out the icon at the top right of the site.

[gregsadetsky]

Congrats! Small note, your custom icon font is not loading for me, making all icon images look like squares (it's the unicode character used by the font, actually). See: https://imgur.com/a/708lUBr (they're now loading again)

To support more traffic, you could look into dedicated hosting / a CDN (such as cloudflare) for your static files. As you're using Digital Ocean & WordPress, you could use Digital Ocean's CDN offer like this: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-spee...

Another option would be to use dedicated wordpress hosting (wpengine.com or any other well known one) which offers caching and a CDN service -- that could remove some of the hosting / growing concerns.

[arboc]

Thank you for the heads up and the tip! A team member got the same issue as you yesterday but then the icons started working again, just like it was for you. I'll pass this on to the rest of the team.

[uxcolumbo]

Congrats on the launch and great idea.

Did you get any sleep ;)

What’s the tech stack?

[arboc]

Thanks! I actually don't know the technical details myself scratches head except that we're using WordPress (please don't judge ;) - it is very handy when some members, like me, who are less tech-savvy are contributing and it everything has to happen very fast) to edit and publish content. I asked a team member who's worked more on putting together the technical components to come in here - he'll come by a bit later today. I had had some trouble submitting the thread here at HN yesterday so when I finally managed to do so it was quite late. In retrospect, it probably would've been better to wait until morning, sorry you had to wait for a reply.

And about the sleep part, hehe well I did sleep some but it was hard to quit for the day and especially to stop all homenaut ideas from bouncing around in my head when laying in bed :P

[arboc]

Sorry for the long wait again uxcolumbo. This is the description I got from one of the crew members who worked with more of the technical side of things: "Because we needed speed we hosted a wordpress site with a directory plugin that we hacked into and had the functionality that we needed". Maybe it doesn't clear everything up but hope it helps :)

[arboc]

Small addendum: What was used was just digitalocean+wordpress, with some custom code for the posting / upvoting system (but of course gregsadetsky - see comment above - had already figured out that it was digitalocean)

(also to all posters in the thread, thanks again for all the great feedback! I'd expected people to be harsh here, but I feel very welcomed to HN)