What is The Lonely Web?

After hearing a podcast by WNYC’s Joe Veix about internet content that had not seen the light of day, I was inspired to create a web service to seek out, store and then display it for anyone. The purpose of this service is to bring those “lonely” pieces of content to the forefront and give them some love. It turns out they can be beautiful, wacky, and even sad.

What technologies were used?

Notepad++

The first iteration of this project was coded entirely in Notepad++, using PHP, HTML and CSS, without using an API. I didn’t know how to use APIs at the time (2016), so I just built the crawler from scratch.

PHP

PHP was used heavily to collect, sort, parse, store and display all the data that the crawler collected. There are numerous scripts that run everyday, looking for new content, filtering out videos that don’t match the criteria (too many views), and optimizing the database.

MySQL

I use a very simple database schema, with only 3 tables. I run this service from a shared hosting provider, so my resources are limited. So, I only collect the data I really need to filter and display the lonely content.

NetBeans IDE

I found NetBeans and it greatly helped me coding PHP. NetBeans automatically identified errors and made suggestions for my code, even before publishing it.

YouTube API

When I discovered the YouTube API, it made things a lot easier. However, there were roadblock, including the daily limits imposed by Google. I starting hitting those limits every day in 2017, and have been doing so since.

WordPress

The main barrier to me making the service available to the masses was a lack of a decent front-end interface, and my inexperience with web development. When I discovered how easily I could create an maintain a site using WordPress, it changed everything. I was able to fully configure the front-end you see today in just a couple hours.