It is slow, it does not have many templates yet, it does not look that pretty, it is optimised for Chrome only at the moment, but it is a major personal achievement: I can create slide templates in the SlideMagic desktop app super fast, bulk upload them, manage their search tags, convert the .magic file to thumb images, store everything in a database, allow people to search, download .magic files, .pptx conversions, and manage pro (beta) and non-pro subscribers.
The objective of this web-based template server is to give potential SlideMagic users a taste of what is possible with the app, and serve people who are not willing to use a non-PowerPont user interface to manipulate charts (their loss :-)).
This effort was not a strategic grand plan: I needed a good search engine for myself to optimize tags of slides in the database quickly, and saw that it was very easy to expose that functionality to all SlideMagic users.
Check it out: https://cloud.slidemagic.com, and let me know of any bugs, or major glitches. I am keeping the number of beta testers ver low, since there are obvious bugs that I still need to iron out.
In the near future, I hope to roll the current template store that is hosted on Shopify into my own platform, bug that requires completing the payment platform and upping things to production-grade technology that is expected by paying customers.
The next technology challenge will be go back into the world of databases (which I left behind in 1992), and see how we can make searching of templates smarter (and faster).
To be continued.
UPDATE: If you experience downtime, it could be because I am updating the way slides are saved to speed up search time. The database did not enjoy huge image files, storing them separately on Amazon AWS now.