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geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: SixtyLife on Tue, 12 June 2018, 19:52:18

Title: I built a keyboard website
Post by: SixtyLife on Tue, 12 June 2018, 19:52:18
Hi guys,

I don't post too much, but been in this hobby for around 3 years now and finally feel I can contribute something that I hope will be useful to others in this hobby.

This hobby has brought me great joy but also much anguish. Part of that anguish has been planning builds in my head, trying to imagine with my ****ty imagination how a certain combination of caps and boards and colors would go together. Planning involved lots of googling and searching on R/MK and geekhack and deskthorit to look for builds of others who have built similar configurations, to get a better idea how it might look.

That search process I've never found to be convenient, and so I've built what I see as a "keyboard image database" where people can simultaneously show off their collection and help to inspire others who are searching for similar builds.

It still needs much work, but here's the MVP:

https://www.kbddb.com/

Please feel free to try it out and rip me a new one about how ****ty it is and what needs to be improved.

Next thing I am planning on adding is a notification system.

Thanks all!
-codingcpa / sixtylife
Title: Re: I built a keyboard website
Post by: terrpn on Wed, 13 June 2018, 11:24:59
Hi guys,

I don't post too much, but been in this hobby for around 3 years now and finally feel I can contribute something that I hope will be useful to others in this hobby.

This hobby has brought me great joy but also much anguish. Part of that anguish has been planning builds in my head, trying to imagine with my ****ty imagination how a certain combination of caps and boards and colors would go together. Planning involved lots of googling and searching on R/MK and geekhack and deskthorit to look for builds of others who have built similar configurations, to get a better idea how it might look.

That search process I've never found to be convenient, and so I've built what I see as a "keyboard image database" where people can simultaneously show off their collection and help to inspire others who are searching for similar builds.

It still needs much work, but here's the MVP:

https://www.kbddb.com/

Please feel free to try it out and rip me a new one about how ****ty it is and what needs to be improved.

Next thing I am planning on adding is a notification system.

Thanks all!
-codingcpa / sixtylife
Nice......add a blog somewhere?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Title: Re: I built a keyboard website
Post by: Kavik on Wed, 13 June 2018, 15:59:12
Nice idea! I was actually thinking of something similar recently. I just have a dropbox folder with keyboard pictures I've saved from various places.

It's not exactly the same, but I saw something similar a while back where a guy was collecting keyboard pictures for a coffee table book (https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=78323.0). I looks as though that never took off though.
Title: Re: I built a keyboard website
Post by: SixtyLife on Thu, 14 June 2018, 06:47:36
Nice idea! I was actually thinking of something similar recently. I just have a dropbox folder with keyboard pictures I've saved from various places.

It's not exactly the same, but I saw something similar a while back where a guy was collecting keyboard pictures for a coffee table book (https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=78323.0). I looks as though that never took off though.
Thanks! The site has individual user pages to show off and/or put all your favorite pics in one place if you're interested in putting those dropbox pics up!

Also doing a giveaway if anyone's interested:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/8r15nw/kbddbcom_launch_giveaway/
Title: Re: I built a keyboard website
Post by: Coreda on Thu, 14 June 2018, 07:48:45
Reminds me of Keypuller.com (https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=59130.0) by Matt3o, which has since been taken down for upgrades (no idea when that occurred or if it'll be back up). It listed thumbnails of keycap color schemes and keyboards by build and I thought was a good resource for reference.
Title: Re: I built a keyboard website
Post by: SixtyLife on Thu, 14 June 2018, 08:38:44
oh interesting.. curious about how it looked before the maintenance. I see one screenshot in that thread which gives me an idea. looks really well organized, much more so than the site I built.
Title: Re: I built a keyboard website
Post by: Coreda on Thu, 14 June 2018, 08:54:01
oh interesting.. curious about how it looked before the maintenance. I see one screenshot in that thread which gives me an idea. looks really well organized, much more so than the site I built.

Here's one archived version (http://web.archive.org/web/20150401031521/http://keypuller.com:80/) if you're curious. After checking seems it's been a few years since it was live. Similar kind of rows of thumbnails as you can see, with tags for the type of thing it is.
Title: Re: I built a keyboard website
Post by: SixtyLife on Thu, 14 June 2018, 10:18:18
wow this is really nice. wonder why it hasn't been brought back? This is definitely much more organized and informative than what I'm doing.

Only advantage my site has I think is search speed and being able to see many pics quickly since they're single pics vs an album inside a page.

anyways, thanks for the info, studying it for inspiration
Title: Re: I built a keyboard website
Post by: tp4tissue on Thu, 14 June 2018, 11:12:05
Meh...  where's the keyboard posed with attractive females section ?
Title: Re: I built a keyboard website
Post by: Row009 on Fri, 15 June 2018, 10:17:13
Just my two cents of constructive criticism (which is always better than compliments in my opinion),
I'm aware it is more of a web app rather than a site with actual pages (with unique URL's), but when you load the next page it stays at the bottom rather than bump you up to the top which it should(?).
It is also rather slow, but that must be due to the bandwidth or too many requests to the server (image loading past page 2 is barely existent).

Title: Re: I built a keyboard website
Post by: SixtyLife on Thu, 21 June 2018, 16:32:35
Just my two cents of constructive criticism (which is always better than compliments in my opinion),
I'm aware it is more of a web app rather than a site with actual pages (with unique URL's), but when you load the next page it stays at the bottom rather than bump you up to the top which it should(?).
It is also rather slow, but that must be due to the bandwidth or too many requests to the server (image loading past page 2 is barely existent).
thanks for the feedback.

I've changed it to bump to top on page change.

as for bandwidth, I'm at the mercy of the sizes of images people are linking as I don't actually host the images on my own servers. that being said, I just discovered some imgur tricks which let me utilize smaller images for thumbnails and full images only when a user clicks the image. however, this only works when users have posted imgur images, and that is outside my control for now. so the bandwidth saving trick won't work if a user links an image from google or reddit or other external sources.

anyways, hope to keep improving the site and feedback like this is welcomed. thanks again