Show HN: My girlfriend needed a Secret Santa web app, so I built her one

I built this. Girlfriend needed this to organise her christmas party and we couldn't really find a nice one on the internet.. So I built it myself. Mostly for her and as an exercise for myself (I learnt the basics of Angular and NodeJS along the way), but then my designer friend came up with the design and we put it live. Hope you enjoy it.

Awesome, now get an affiliate account at Amazon and make gift suggestions

This is cool but using Ghostery plugin on Chrome (<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghostery/mlomiejdfkolichcflejclcbmpeaniij" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;ghostery&#x2F;mlomiejdf...</a>) reveals 16 different javascript trackers and advertising libraries used on this website. I know in the footer it states &quot;Memo from Santa does not store e-mail addresses. We will not send you e-mails apart from the event e-mail, nor will we use your e-mail address for any other purpose.&quot; but as this being a free service it&#x27;s kind of worrying. Should I be worried about giving the emails of all my relatives and friends?

I tried this earlier with three people. Two of them were told to give presents to the same person, and one person was left present-free.<p>Not sure if you&#x27;ve fixed that already, but it seems like an important feature to get right...

If someone tests this and their email goes to spam, would they be so kind to pastebin me the message headers&#x2F;mime so I can try to solve that together with the Mailgun folks? Thanks a bunch.

Note; you should fix your SPF records, all mails end up in spam.

Great job, this seems pretty fun. Plus, I&#x27;m sure your girlfriend really appreciates it, which is always awesome :)<p>Just one slight thing I noticed is that the &quot;winsdom_scriptregular&quot; font is quite hard to read.

HN people might not care about this sort of thing (ending a sentence with a preposition), but it screams out at me:<p>&quot;We&#x27;ll make sure everyone knows for whom to buy a present!&quot; vs. &quot;We&#x27;ll make sure everyone knows whom to buy a present for!&quot;<p>Good job on the who vs. whom though..

I recently did Secret Santa app too, but it is frontend only (no server side, to be ran with all people present). I did it mostly to play with AngularJS, but it has some nice geeky features like using truly uniform shuffling and Fortuna PRNG for more unpredictability. It&#x27;s in russian, but interface is pretty obvious, so feel free to try it :)<p><a href="http://evgeniuz.github.io/santa/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;evgeniuz.github.io&#x2F;santa&#x2F;</a>

Looks great!!<p>Was just about to set up a Secret Santa on Elfster... was wondering how your site stacks up in terms of facilitating a gift exchange between friends&#x2F;coworkers?

Ha, looks nice! You could monetize this by letting everyone fill out a wish-list and offer affiliate-linked suggestions based on what is filled in? (Same as <a href="http://namentrekken.be" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;namentrekken.be</a> does this; that wasn&#x27;t an option for your gf? :)

Very cool, an inspiration. How long would you say it took you? (hours of work)<p>I ask as a young developer looking to gauge where he stands. Anyone have resources they could suggest for gauging fast&#x2F;slow development for oneself?

great idea! :) I&#x27;ve been using elfster for the last couple of years.

Currently, when I fill out the form, I have no idea what&#x27;s going out to the recipients - perhaps a mad libs-esque design would explain why each field, e.g. party title, is necessary :)

What platform did you use for deployment? When I dove into Node awhile back it seemed the most difficult part was finding a stable hosting solution...

It&#x27;s very pretty, what did you use to design the site visually? Just plain old html&#x2F;css? A template? It&#x27;s simple but good looking!

Minor annoyance: The &quot;Amount of cash to spend&quot; slide bar, needs to have its color inverted.<p>Otherwise, i think it looks great :)

Diggin it. Already using Elfster though!

Nice work! I built a similar site a few years ago and it&#x27;s turned out to be pretty popular.

Elfster works pretty well!

load page.<p>press &quot;+&quot;<p>visible error message

So?