Hi all, I’m finally, after at least one complete rewrite (that darn Anvil, always adding essential new features), doing a soft-launch of my large app. Here’s the intro blurb I’m posting elsewhere:
Welcome to Detectives Guild!
We provide interactive stories for the readers in your life who want to do more than just read, but also participate. In our stories the reader takes an active part in how the story plays out, and in our mysteries must work out whodunit.
Follow us to see when we have new stories available. Join our discussion group (Detectives Guild Discussions | Facebook) to talk about our stories, or to get notice of private coupon codes.
Visit our website at https://detectivesguild.com/ to try one of our stories for free. You can also send them to others as gifts!
If you have communities where it’d be appropriate to share something like this, I’d appreciate the exposure. If you’re not sure what it is after the blurb above, you can try a couple of the stories for free without registering, and give me ideas on how to better describe it.
For those who are interested in the technical side of things, the website itself is a static website generated using https://urubu.jandecaluwe.com/, a Python static site generator. The static website is hosted on Render.com.
The shopping cart is Javascript which communicates with HTTP endpoints on the Anvil app to submit orders. Payment processing is handled through Stripe, although not using Anvil’s built-in integration.
Customers then use the Anvil app to send the stories to their recipient, manage their email subscription preferences, etc.
Recipients get a personalized link through email and can play the stories without logging in or having an account (essential in the US since I imagine some of the recipients will be under the age of 13).
There’s also an author-side portion of the Anvil app for authors to create stories, and an admin-side portion for tasks I think I’ll need for customer support.
This has been an enormous undertaking, and one I can safely say would never have happened without the leverage Anvil provides. With any other web framework I’d still be trying to get it to work the way I wanted, or have given up in frustration.