Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
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Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#2Excellent article about creating a niche community within an underserved market. I'm not sure the success here is as much about the platform as it is about the brilliant utility of the site to its members.
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#3Pretty good setup, but Cogent? Eek! Those guys run the crappiest network I've ever seen. You certainly get what you pay for. And they're combining that with CloudFront? Seems like a weird combination that results in their not getting their money's worth (on Amazon's side).
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#4I note that this has been mentioned in 5 comments before in the history of Hacker News. Which is approximately once for every terabyte of knitting patterns they have stored. Or once for every 100,000 registered users. Or once for every 700k monthly page views.
Excuse me. Daily page views.
But to look at how much attention they get among technically inclined people, you'd think they were less important than the average URL shortener.
There are a million and one underserved markets in the other half of the population, gentleman, and no one you know has any interest in competing with you if you slice off one of them.
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#5Check out BurdaStyle.com - also a very successfull DIY site that's built on Rails.
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#6"If you listen to Paul Graham and whoever else, then you’ll be working on your startup while you have a day job."
Funny how he kind of got that backwards. pg says go fulltime. 37signals are the 'keep the dayjob' crowd.
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#7I note that this has been mentioned in 5 comments before in the history of Hacker News. Which is approximately once for every terabyte of knitting patterns they have stored. Or once for every 100,000 registered users. Or once for every 700k monthly page views. Excuse me. Daily page views. But to look at how much attention they get among technically inclined people, you'd think they were less important than the averag…
Indeed. And the reason I look over my wife's shoulder now and then when she's on her computer.
She's a craft/fashion/music/wedding nut and I've had more than a couple ideas for that half of the population.
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#8Excellent article about creating a niche community within an underserved market. I'm not sure the success here is as much about the platform as it is about the brilliant utility of the site to its members.
Agreed, although I don't know about niche (a lot of people knit...) or underserved. There are numerous resources and communities for knitters and crocheters out there. The only reason why I love Ravelry over them all is because it manages to wrap everything up into a nice user-friendly website that (if one cared for them) is packed full of all sorts of useful features that other sites couldn't even begin to offer. Try to find another knitting community online where you can look at a pattern done in another yarn without attempting to knit it (and possibly wasting a lot of time). It's a lot harder than you think. On Ravelry it's a single click away.
Ravelry doesn't even replace half of these resources out there - most of the patterns are still going to be in books and magazines or on other websites, all the knitter bloggers will keep on blogging on their own sites, people will still go on other forums for, say, a specific yarn brand to ask questions there. But it is the glue that holds it all together in a single place so you don't have to go searching in Google and half a dozen sites to find patterns and talk to other fiber arts enthusiasts.
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#9I note that this has been mentioned in 5 comments before in the history of Hacker News. Which is approximately once for every terabyte of knitting patterns they have stored. Or once for every 100,000 registered users. Or once for every 700k monthly page views. Excuse me. Daily page views. But to look at how much attention they get among technically inclined people, you'd think they were less important than the averag…
Indeed. And the reason I look over my wife's shoulder now and then when she's on her computer. She's a craft/fashion/music/wedding nut and I've had more than a couple ideas for that half of the population.
Agreed. I am currently working on a site to fill a need that my wife, an artist, has. I found that the best way to find great ideas is to ask friends and family.
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#10900 new users a day. For a knitting and crochet site. Absolutely amazing.