Welcome!
If you're reading this, you're one of the brave early testers/users of Slick. With your help, I can bring this beast to market and make mountains of cash absolutely no money.
Because it's free.
Nevertheless, you and I will get to say that we helped pioneer how apps and services CAN be made, without the ad-soaked greed we see on the web today. Anyway, thank you so much for helping shape this pet project, and I'm confident we can make this the start of something EPIC. It's a truly humbling experience to have such amazing supporters during these [very rough] early days!
So what is Slick?
The Short Version
Slick is a free platform for displaying your imagery in a sexy, magazine-like fashion (that you can customize to your heart's content), managed easily using your own existing cloud storage tools.
The Longer Version
Slick is really the answer to my own frustrations over the years while trying to display my artwork in a way that wasn't clunky or difficult to manage. As a developer, I had no patience for existing engines (e.g. Wordpress, Wix, etc) that felt super painful compared to what I know we can build, and as an artist, I had no patience for anything less than an iOS-like experience for the viewing and browsing of the gallery. I really dislike websites that feel like websites!
While chasing this vision over the years, I've written blog engine after blog engine (to power my own sites), yet never loved the steps to manage my content later - which, for a lazy person like myself, is one more roadblock in the way of actually using it to create/share content. Anyway, fast-forward to 2020, and we have sick tools at our disposal (cloud storage, wicked-fast serverless achitecture, etc) to make this a possibility!
On top of that, as an open-source developer (that means I believe in sharing/giving-away the code I write so that others can move faster as well), it was an easy decision to provide this as a free service (as long as I don't go broke hosting it). I'll eventually find *some* way to ethically make money off it (if nothing else to pay for itself), but it should not be by selling data, sponsors, promotions, ads, annoyingly low pay walls, etc. I want a full, reasonable user experience to be available without ever spending a dime.
Example Gallery
Want to see what the end result is? Here's an example gallery, with a blend of my actual art, and some trash images (e.g. from my phone) that I'm testing on. This should give you a rough idea of where it's headed, and what you can expect if using it with your own images!
Why bother?
FIRST To put it simply, I wanted an easier way to display my own images. As a photographer, I felt cramped by existing tools. I wanted to be able to get images into a gallery in fewer steps (like... zero steps, because I'm incredibly lazy), do all this from my phone, and I wanted the end result to look/feel like a sexy magazine. Like everyone else, I use Instagram, but I wanted a better experience for story-driven imagery - and let's face it... writing a story in an Instagram post/comment is cumbersome at best. On top of this all, I also wanted more than one album. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to display a quick album for a few friends without cluttering my precious Insta feed...
SECOND As a reader of content on the internet, I *strongly* dislike ads. I think it's a super lazy way to monetize in 2020, and creates the need for things like ad-blockers, then popups from sites demanding that you turn OFF your ad-blockers, etc. It's a viscious cycle. Users are demanding an ad-free experience, yet content providers seem to be unable/unwilling to budge
Slick will never have ads.
Ever.
Let me repeat that again, just for good measure...
Slick will never have ads.
THIRD As an open-source developer and advocate for change, I believe we can make services that put the consumer first, rather than profit. In theory, the public will reward you for making an awesome service - if nothing else, by using and sharing it.
Who can use it?
Currently Slick is only usable by Dropbox users, but I'm opening that up to the other major cloud storage providers (likely Google One/Drive first) soon. Hang in there while the early adopters help me work out the kinks!
How does it work?
When you sign in for the first time, Dropbox will create an Apps folder in the root of your Dropbox account. Inside that, you'll find a slick.af folder. This is your home base! It's the only area Slick can even read, so your other content is completely safe.
To get images into Slick, simply place images into the slick.af folder. You can do this lots of ways... either from your computer (if you have a synced folder on your hard drive), through the web interface on Dropbox.com, share images from your Camera Roll from your phone to Dropbox, etc. The images will be viewable within your Slick collection within a few seconds.
Removing images is just as easy. Simply remove them from the slick.af folder. They'll disappear from Slick within a few seconds.
Editing you'll have to figure out on your own for now!
For the tech nerds
You may have noticed that Slick is fast as hell. This was made possible by a few key things:
Slick is deployed 100% using the incredible new Cloudflare Worker architecture. No Express server, no Heroku, no VPS, no server at all. All serverless functions. For the super nerds, this is roughly 20x faster than an AWS Lambda function on cold start, and available on edges worldwide mere seconds after deployment. Speaking of, my build/deployment times are usually around 10 seconds from the time I run the deploy command (includes webpack bundling) until the code is live on the web. For those you still building containers (e.g. Kubernetes, Docker, etc), I'd suggest taking a look at the much faster future that's ahead of us :) I hope to post some YouTube video tutorials once I get some free time!
To handle the complexities of routing within a single Cloudflare Worker function, I published the ~400 byte itty-router that gives internal routing very similar to Express.js, complete with route/query params, middleware handling, etc. This tiny function gives me a full blown API under a single endpoint. It's pretty sick :)
All the data is stored in Cloudflare Workers KV. This had some challenges of course, coming from a long background in SQL/Mongo - but the end result is a blazing fast key value store that can outpace most other data stores (for this use case).
The entire code (when not logged in) is under 50KB. That's about 2% the size of an average web app in 2020!