from Hacker News

This was inspired by Upworthy's advice [0] that for you to discover the best headline for your content, you must force yourself to write 25 of them and the best will jump out at you.

So yeah, you can do this in a text editor, or a spreadsheet, or whatever, but I had a spare evening and I wanted to cut my teeth on Facebook's React JS library. I picked a simple example and set to work. The end result is this little app. I like the idea of distraction-free writing, and a simple list-style app with no visual clutter seemed like a nice environment to write headlines.

I got a jump-start by looking at the React TodoMVC example [1], then creating a simple build process with grunt & browserify (which I've now extracted into a starter project for others to use [2]). I have to say I really like React and a lot of the design decisions it's made, although writing in the pseudo-JS syntax (JSX) took a little getting used to, but was made easier with a code highlighting plugin for Sublime.

Have a play, and let me know what you think!

http://colin-gourlay.com/25headlines/

[0]: http://www.slideshare.net/Upworthy/upworthy-10-ways-to-win-the-internets

[1]: http://todomvc.com/labs/architecture-examples/react/

[2]: https://github.com/colingourlay/grunt-init-browserify-react-stylus