Sunday, April 14, 2013

CharityVid - A new way to donate to charity


CharityVid allows anybody to donate to a charity of their choice absolutely free, no credit card required. The only thing we ask is that they watch a short sponsored YouTube video, and that's it.

I've been working on CharityVid for a couple months now, and now finally I'm putting it out there for the world to see. Building it has been extremely interesting from both a business and technical perspective, and I plan to start a mini series here about some of the key technical details that make up the site. I plan on covering:

  • using an AWS load balancer
  • server performance configurations
  • Zero downtime deploys
  • front end performance (page load) optimizations
  • logging, and server monitoring
  • unit testing


and a few more topics (I'll probably combine a few together). CharityVid has been my first large project to make it all the way from inception to production and I can't wait to see how it turns out.

Check it out! Let me know what you think.


2 comments:

  1. Is there a reason that Facebook login is required? It's probably turning away some potential users (myself included).

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    1. I definitely agree that having the option to login without Facebook would be beneficial, however the biggest issue is preventing bots/spammers from taking advantage of the system. The site is built on an advertiser user trust relationship, and maintaining that trust is extremely important to the site. I may in the future add a phone based authentication system (using Twilio), but for now Facebook provides an easy way to verify people really are people.

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