Quick “Thank You” Cards
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A tiny side project. Design a postcard online, pay $1-3 via Stripe, have your postcard printed and mailed on your behalf.
Overview
I started this side project a fun thing to do in my free time. It’s currently sitting offline until/if I find the time/motivation to turn it into something bigger.
The idea is simple. Design your postcard online and have it printed and mailed on your behalf. It’s not a new idea. There are a number of places that do this already, and really well:
Version one’s goal was to emulate similar functionality at a slightly lower cost via Lob.com’s API. I managed to get that far, and even added:
- Address verification
- Touch support for mobile devices
- Stripe API payments
Version two is where the product would really differentiate itself:
- “Text to RSVP” feature w/ Twilio integration
- Registry/donation Short URLs
- Safely attach e-giftcards
- etc.
The website was live briefly, but is currently down to save on hosting costs. It may be forever banished to the land of “not quite finished projects”, but at least it was fun to work on.
Card Designer
You can see the basics here: upload, resize, reposition, overlay, message (front and back), default gallery images
Address Verification
Nothing too fancy here. Hitting an API, returning the corrected address. Ideally, this should prompt users before making the substitution. There’s no guarantee that their address is actually wrong. Case in point: new house builds.
Printed & Received Card
A little funny. Apparently postcards are sorted by high speed scans and belts. It’s decently common for small scratches to appear on postcards where the belts touch and heat the card.
Hence why my daughter’s eye is all terminator-y.
- You can see an album of app images: HERE
Technology Used
- Gulp, WebPack, NPM
- HTML5, SCSS, and Canvas Element
- Vue approachable, versatile, performant js view framework
- AWS Lambda for hosting and easy deployment
- Stripe Payments for payment processing
- Lob to process received HTML + JSON and print + mail the postcard
- C# ASP.NET Core backend, hosted on Windows (IIS Kestrel)
