I’ve learned a ton of great stuff in the last year and I’ve had a lot of fun learning all of it. Most of it is not easy to just throw onto a webpage, but some of it is exactly that. So, I’m working on a website to display a lot of what I’ve learned about web design and development (mostly from reading and watching videos, it’s amazing how many great resources there are out there, but also with some very kind and smart engineers answering a question now and then, you know who you are). Some of the tools I’ve used so far are:
I used Ruby on Rails (programming language with pre-written code that makes it easy to build interactive websites), HTML/HAML, CSS/SASS, Javascript, jQuery to build thetruthaboutlawschool.com. It still has a long way to go, but it’s alive. I started the project as a simple, local (the website was stored on my own computer, so I didn’t need an internet connection to hold the code or send the website to other people) Ruby on Rails application. It grew to Assembla (free git repository — the code for the website is saved there), started being driven by Pivotal Tracker (free product management tool — makes lists of tasks and keeps track of the progress of the all), launched through Heroku (free hosting — sends the website to the internet) for the world to see, moved over to github (free open source git repository to show my code to the public), grew with the help of Javascript and jQuery (makes website faster and adds features, such as checking to ensure people fill out the form properly), reCAPTCHA (free spam blocker), Google Analytics (free tracker of user and performance data), and Disqus (free manager of comments and more). It’s amazing what one can now do on the internet with a little knowledge and a lot of free help.
Resources for Startup Operators 