If only it was easier to find that How-To information when building with Bubble...

Well, it's going to be. I have a cunning plan which will be good for all of us.

Jul 03, 2022

Hello lovely Bubble builders,

I’ve been a bit quiet on the newsletter lately due to be being busy setting up my new product, so I thought I’d give you an update about it.

I’m a magpie, meaning when I see information online about how to solve a particular Bubble build problem, I make a note of it, confident that if I ever need that solution during a build, that I’ll easily re-find that golden nugget of information.

But it doesn’t work out like that. It usually goes like this:

start trying to build a particular feature [i.e advanced filtering of a repeating group]
have a vague memory I saw something about this [was probably months ago]
sort of think it was on twitter.. maybe that guy with the photo, was it a hat or something… or was it in an email?
go searching through my twitter bookmarks for it.. try and find the profile pic with a hat…?
maybe it was in a slack thread.. go looking
eventually work out it was in a tweet, which had a link to a loom video.
viola! done. info found, but 20 minutes wasted.

Some time in the future, I have a different problem to solve, and repeat this whole process. 20 more minutes wasted.

OK, well it’s not always like this, but it often is, and there is only so much wrangling of chrome bookmarks, twitter bookmarks, youtube channels, loom videos, slack threads, bubble forum posts, reddit posts etc that I can manage. I’ve got a good memory, but it’s still more difficult that it should be.

Let’s do better

I’m creating a solution to this problem, to make my life easier, but it will also make your life easier too. We all want answers quickly, and at the right time, and ideally have them accessible within the Bubble editor during the build process.

My vision for FindNoCode.info is that it becomes the go-to place when we need info to solve a bubble build problem.

Scope

Although this is essentially just an information management problem that could apply to anything, I’m focusing for now just on Bubble. Later down the track I’m not ruling out other NoCode tools, but for now it want it just for our specific use case.

Content

I’m not copying or hosting the actual content onto this site.. the solution contains a Title & Description of the content, the Author, some Metadata and a link to the source, all surfaced in a quick and easy search UI powered by Algolia. Also, I’m not trying to build-the-next-google. This is focussed as a curated list of quality answers to Bubble specific how-to questions.

Attribution

It’s important to note here that this isn’t putting already-free content behind some kind of paywall. The content stays where it is, in full control of the Author.. this tool just makes it much quicker and easier to find. Each link is attributed, and I’m planning to provide metrics to Authors showing the traffic being driven to their content from this site. A win-win.

Submit - Curate - Search

So, what I’ve done is set up a new Bubble app, because Bubble is what I like building with. What I’m doing is establishing a process where I, and you, can submit a link to to be indexed. This could be any useful answer to a Bubble Build problem. Things like tweets explaining how to filter Repeating Groups ; Bubble Forum posts explaining how to extract text from html ; Youtube video links showing how to set up pagination… you get the idea… all those links you are currently storing in various places, but may be difficult to quickly re-find later on when you need them.

So that’s the ‘adding’ part. I also have a ‘finding’, which is basically a search field, but the magic is that I’m using Algolia so that the search results are both quick and high quality. My testing is also showing it is tolerant of spelling mistakes [yay], and great at surfacing data when we only have some breadcrumbs in our memory. For example if I can only remember the source was from ‘Matt’ and it was about ‘groups’, then that’s still enough to find the link.

In between the adding and the searching is the curation part. That’s me, at least for now. I’ll manually eyeball each submitted link, automate some meta data collection about it, validate it’s a useful answer to a real problem, then approve, or file it.

Note: I have some other plans regarding Browse functionality, which could be useful for wandering around amongst the goodies, because often you just don’t know what you don’t know. Some of my biggest discoveries have been like that.. watching a youtube explainer about topic x, and the author casually mentions some amazing other thing I’d never heard of.

Chrome Extension

I’ve built a Chrome extension, so that one click will slide out a UI panel in which you can search for Bubble answers. It’s being fine tuned at the moment, and I’ll be submitting this for Google approval before the beta test stage. The actual UI will evolve from what you see below, but here is a sneak peak:

WaitList

The app is almost ready for Beta testing, and if you are keen to get involved, or just curious, you can leave your details to get on the Waitlist at https://findnocode.info

There are currently 71 people on the list at time of writing.

Submission form

I received some good advice that I should set up a url submission form ASAP, so that the golden links of answers can start to flow in, while I’m building this out. I’d greatly appreciate your help with adding content.. please fish out those chrome bookmarks, twitter bookmarks, links to youtube videos etc that answer bubble build how-to’s and submit them for indexing at:

https://findnocode.info/add