Interface Lovers is an online digital magazine dedicated to interviewing various creative professionals. I had the opportunity to work on this with the amazing Timothy Achumba and William Channer.
My Role
I was the primary developer on this project, being responsible for both the front-end and back-end parts. I also help setup the infrastructure and deployment process for the site.
The Stack
For this project, we decided to use PHP and the wonderful CMS Kirby. Why? Because we wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Kirby’s flat-file database made it easy for us to start working on the site’s design and layout to create a unique, pleasurable experience. For the web server, I was too lazy to get SSL properly setup with NGINX, so I decided to try out Caddy instead. This is all runing on a $10 DigitalOcean droplet. For the CDN, we’re using Cloudflare. It’s one click setup is just too great. With all of these things combined, we’ve been getting great mileage on the site with little issues.
The Launch
I have to say, this was a pretty successful launch. We released the site on May 4 2017, taking the #1 spot on ProductHunt, Designer News, and hitting the top 5 posts on HackerNews for the day. Also, 30,000+ pageviews in a single day ain’t that bad either.
Conclusion
Since it’s inception, InterfaceLovers has been well-received all over the web. We’ve been interviewed by sites like Kirby to talk about the technical aspects of the site. We even got nominated on Awwwards! It’s been a joy to work on this project and polish it and I’m hopeful for its future!