The art of not paying for stuff
I DON’T MEAN STEALING—
What I mean by “not paying for stuff” is seeing some existing service, and making my own, crappier version for free.
I’ve been doing this a lot, mainly in part due to the fact that I can’t pay for stuff online, but it’s also a super cool learning experience and allows me to create my own version of a service that’s free for me, forever.
Here’s an example:
Guestbooks
If you didn’t know, there’s a secret page somewhere on my main website, which leads on to a guestbook:
I wrote a custom emoji system for it that works similar to Discord’s so I could add stupid irrelevant pictures to messages :3
There are services that provide guestbooks, and some are completely free, however one I was using shut down and I don’t really want to redirect all my users to “sketchyguestbook123.com”, so I thought it was probably better for me to make my own. The way that works is with some fun Google Sheets API stuff.
I don’t want to go into a huge amount of detail because I only half-understand this stuff, but basically: you can create some App Scripts within a Google Sheet that can accept get and post requests, and modify or return sheet data accordingly. Basically, what I can do is write a little code that grabs the list of entries from the spreadsheet and turns that into the actual guestbook, and another going the other way to add to the google sheet.
See the full script here
Besides taking a few seconds to load in, this honestly works really well and looks way more professional than redirecting to another service. And nobody even needs to know that I’m simply doing it out of frugality and not because I want to be professional! … wait…
I’ve actually been thinking of making a similar system for comments on blog posts here, but it would need to be a little more complicated to account for the creation of new posts.
Mailing list
There’s a decent chance that if you’re reading this you actually got this post in your email! Or that my code failed to work. I’ve been messing around with sending emails with smtplib in python and it’s been super cool. I literally just set up a script that grabs the RSS feed from this blog and if it hasn’t been too long since the last post’s creation, sends it out to all of the email addresses in another google sheet. I also have a little (kinda ugly) form set up over here that allows one to sign up for the mailing list and have their email put into the same sheet. Then, my script does some Google API stuff and sends out an email from my email address to each subscribed address. Assuming this all works, that is.
I’ve tested it on myself already, so hopefully it all works out well. There’s also a small chance everyone gets the same post 2 days in a row, but hopefully not. The nice thing about this all though is, again, it all looks nice and I don’t have to pay a subscription for it! It’s just a script scheduled on a Raspberry Pi to run once a day.
I would share this code, but it has a LOT of sensitive info including my email address, an app specific password, and some API keys which I do NOT want to share today.
Web.. site… (?)
I guess you could also say I used a similar mindset for my website since it’s all coded by hand, and part of the reason I know any amount of Javascript at all. That wasn’t really intentional at all, I just wanted to learn html and css and all that stuff and never really liked website builders.
I don’t know if this really counts cause this is a lot more common than making a mailing list over using something like Mailchimp, but whatever.
I did have my own custom blog system originally as an exercise in doing Javascript, but now I’m using Jekyll which is way nicer to use overall, and hosted in Github pages the same way as my normal website so it’s MORE DIY than if I was using something like Blogger.
Moral of the story? Don’t bother paying or stealing or whatever, just make an inferior product yourself. 👍👍