Creating your community social website with no pain thanks to Meteor
Telescope
Telescope is an awesome Meteor app for quickly creating community websites such as the popular Hacker News or the newly emerging startup Product Hunt ,you can run your community websites with social features in a couple of minutes ,with customization you can take a couple of hours to establish a fully fledged community social website.
Telescope is based on Meteor,the new node.js open source and full stack Javascript framework that makes creating web apps a breeze ,Meteor takes web development to another level with its features,Meteor particularly makes it easy to develop real time and social applications.
With meteorjs you can use Javascript on the client and server
Installing and running Telescope
If you develop under Mac or Linux OS,you simply type the following line on the terminal to first install Meteor
curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh
Lately the Meteor team has released an official installer for Windows ,you can check how to install meteor under Windows on their site.
The next thing you are going to do, is cloning the Telescope repo from Github, by issuing this command
git clone https://github.com/TelescopeJS/Telescope.git
You are going to have a telescope directory created for you with all telescope code,just enter inside telescope with
cd Telescope
and run Your Meteor with
meteor
and here comes Telescope actually Meteor with Telescope :)
visit http://localhost:3000 with your browser and you should see your app up and running .
Customizing Telescope
By design Telescope is very flexible ,you can customize colors for header and buttons in Settings ,after creating an account.
You can also enable thumbnails,but first get an Embedly API key and add it in the Settings panel.
Optionally ,you can also provide your MailChimp API key and list id in the settings panel,set the sending frequency and then enable Telescope to generate and send newsletters of the best posts .
Play with your telescope app,create an account and go to Settings to customize basic elements of your website ,such as site title and description,header color etc..
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