[failedsides]

https://categorybooks.com/

I thought about aggregating books by prizes their authors had won, so you could browse books written by chemistry Nobel Prize winners or Fields Medal winners. I quickly gave up on the project, but I'm sure I poured hundreds of hours into it before that. I'm not too despondent about it anymore, and learned a lot (it's my first ever website, and only one so far!) - it was quite gruelling to manually go through all of the authors and choose pictures and attach affiliate links.. I'm sure the affiliate links have already expired as there wasn't a single buy through them.

[basicneo]

I like the idea, and your website looks great.

What would you do differently if you had to redo it?

[failedsides]

Thanks a ton!

I would get going with a more popular technology (I chose Svelte and Sapper). Like I mentioned, it's the first website I've ever built, so I ran into some problems that I'm sure would have been easier to deal with had there been a bigger community and more tutorials available. I was fixated on it being as fast as possible, which is perhaps quite ironic with the amount of images it's downloading - not lazily.

I have to admit now that I'm thinking about building a second project, that my technology stack will also be governed by what employers are looking for. I'm currently working in a non-tech industry, but I'm starting to think about trying to transition.

Another thing that came to mind was that I'd try to remove some of the monotonous tasks that made it such a grind, like manually compressing all of the images and trying to find the right size. That was a huge ordeal, and I would've been better off with implementing lazy loading and just running the images through some compression automatically or not compressing them at all. I really should have done that.

I'd also probably try to advertise it a bit more. This is the only time I've mentioned the project, and it's almost a year old. I was just hoping people would magically stumble into it.. I'm sure even a dollar or two from it would have given me the motivation to at least complete the parts I'd planned out for and actually found interesting myself.

Thanks again for the compliment and happy New Year's!