Dashy

When I first started to develop this business, I was quickly overwhelmed with a huge number of things to do. I wanted to develop my own tool to organize myself.

A tool which, in a way, brings together all my life. A tool accessible from anywhere in the world with a simple internet connection.

The idea was to connect to it, and to have access to all my contacts, my administrative documents, music, projects, tasks, images, videos etc, I think you understood the idea.

Currently this tool is far from what it will be tomorrow. But I wanted to make it available to other people for free. I also find my interest there. It allows me to have the first feedback on my tool and the first users. I'm sure that will motivate me to continue in this direction.

This tool allows me to track my activity over time and keep a written record (since I'm upside down) and access information quickly. Currently the development is primarily intended for my personal use.

At the time of this writing, it is August 31, 2020 and I have set myself the goal of focusing on the development of my dashboard throughout the month of September.

At the end of this month, this tool should be available as an android and ios application from the code of the web version. This application must be able to send push notifications to the user with personalized messages.

The tool will be available to new users, who will be able to create an account directly from the app or the app's presentation page.

These users will have access to a personal space allowing a storage system for managing their media (documents, images, videos and music) with 1 GB of available storage, a music player, a task management system, a monitoring system. accounting as well as a contact management system

My goal is to produce a fluid and ergonomic deliverable. Correct all display bugs and secure the tool.

For the occasion I created a presentation page of the tool. You can access it via this link . From this page you cannot yet create an account (it does not work).

Logbook

So here we are on 09/14/2020 it is 8am. Basically I was creating the spaces on the dashboard, currently it is installed on my personal site. I wanted to take care of setting up the first email that the person receives with their login details and a personalized message. I thought maybe I had to find a cool name for my app. I had thought of Dashboard but it doesn't really suit me.

Then I had an idea. To find the name of my app, write a script that gives me the 200 shortest available domain names in the world. Technically it is doable and hopefully I can find a cool 4 or 5 character one.

To be able to do that I had to do a script that generates all the possible combinations of a certain number of characters, then use a function on each combination to check the availability of a domain name and display only the domain names available.

I started to parse it, translate it into French and make it more digestible visually. I integrated it as an online tool just below.

So far what has taken me the longest is checking availability. At first I looked at a native php checkdns function until I realized that to check availability exactly I need to get the whois of the domain name. I finally found a function that retrieves it and that works, I launched a simultaneous request on a small sample of domain names but the connection to whois crashes on the second connection.

Maybe by sending one request at a time in ajax the problem will be solved.

For the rest, it is about halfway through the month. I made good progress on mobile display, the creation of personal spaces, separation and resolution of display bugs. There is everything that takes shape little by little.

For the first app transformation and notifications it's going to be a hassle, I know. But once this is done the next developments will be much easier.

Edit of 09/22: That's it :) AJAX requests are magic. It was easy too. Now I have the opportunity to test over 200 domain names before the script crashes. The next step will be to store all the domain names already tested in the database and not to make an identical request. This stuff is great. In the meantime I thought (it's been a long time) of Dashy as a name. The available domain would be dashy.in but I would like to find one of 4 characters, in .com

Meanwhile the web version is now available in French, English, Spanish and Korean with several customization options.