UPDATE - 2019
There are some posts on Subins. But, I never wrote detailed about “The Subins Project”. I don’t know why. So I’m writing this for archival purposes.
I lost the source code of “The Subins Project” because I accidentally formatted by whole drive back in 2013 during an installation of Windows XP (their installer is very bad !).
I named it “Subins” seeing how Linux was named from its creator Linus. It had a
- Search engine
- Chat site (Google hangouts like)
- Social network site called Friendshood (like Facebook)
- Games site (like Chrome web store)
- Videos site (YouTube)
- Wiki site (like wikipedia)
- URL Shortener. This was my first repo in GitHub, but it’s not the exact site
- and some more (I don’t remember)
I didn’t know GitHub back then, else would have published the source code.
Tech
It was created entirely with PHP and had design/style inspired (and copied ?) from Google, Facebook and elsewhere. I learnt web development with this project :
Starting from a google search of
"How to create a website"to"How to host on AppFog".I spent countless hours working on it. I think I started this in 2011 November or something and it got hosted in 2012 December.
I was in 7th & 8th grade during the time.
The project was hosted online with help of [AppFog.com] (a PaaS provider) in 2012. They gave free hosting back then. I wrote a blog post on it here.
The code was a disaster
- I used mysql_query() for everything. The whole site was vulnerable to MySQL Injection and probably lots of other vulnerabilities.
- One of my friend did point this to me and I took down the site cause all the user details was easily accessible.
- The code had bad indentation and coding standards. I kinda remember it. It was very ugly. YUCK !
- Passwords weren’t hashed. DISASTER 💯
What’s Left
All that’s left of “The Subins Project” are these screenshots and the archived webpages on archive.org :
- Search Engine - subins.hp.af.cm - https://web.archive.org/web/20130101000000*/http://subins.hp.af.cm:80/
- Accounts Management Site - accounts-subins.hp.af.cm - https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://accounts-subins.hp.af.cm:80
- Subins Chat - chat-subins.hp.af.cm - https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://chat-subins.hp.af.cm:80
- Subins Get - get-subins.hp.af.cm - https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://get-subins.hp.af.cm:80
- Friendshood - fd-subins.hp.af.cm - https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://fd-subins.hp.af.cm:80
- Subins Apps - apps-subins.hp.af.cm - https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://apps-subins.hp.af.cm:80
Aftermath
- I went on to create a better social network with Open
- I created a better search engine with a custom crawler
- I became a much better programmer !
And looking back now :
Although it was a disaster, I learnt a LOT !
That’s what matters at the end :)