Thursday, October 2, 2014

When to start over?

I've been thinking about blowing up Sites with Benefits and starting over.  It's actually a couple years old now.  Overall, I wouldn't really call it a success though.  At times it has shined, other times not so much.  Technically, it works.  However, the administration side could stand to see a lot of improvements.  It's a big obstacle to other people using the system.

It is currently written in Python on Google's App Engine.  Lately though, I have been working with Node.JS and MongoDB, I feel they would be a better fit for the app.  Moving to Node would also let me rewrite the Twitch bot so it is hosted on my server instead of the users machine.  It would be pretty much a complete rewrite though.

Another feature I could add with a rewrite is to make use of PassportJS.  This library would let people log in with their Twitch account, among others.  Since Twitch and Youtube are two groups I want to focus on, it would be quite useful.

It would be a lot of work, but I'm not sure it is worth the effort.  The original version never took off, what makes me think the new version would?   Of course, I'll never know unless I try.