700,000 members and still 'beta'?
Google Syndrome. "Beta" is meaningless now.
Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
21–30 of 30 posts
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#22I 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…
Working on my own: http://doleaf.com
Not that guys can't be into gardens as well. I love getting my hands dirty :)
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#23I recently introduced my wife (a crochet-addict) to Ravelry. The result? She's now a Ravelry-addict. I can hardly get on the laptop myself these days. She's taking photos, queuing up projects, checking out patterns and even going as far as entering her "stash" of wool so she can track it all. The one problem is that there's no api so it's a walled garden... and my wife really wants a public portfolio site. If Ravelry…
http://www.ravelry.com/help/api isn't much but it should be enough to make a project portfolio. Post on the Ravelry board if you have any questions :)
hmmm... interesting.
It looks like you can only get info for in-progress projects though. Really she wants a public version of the projects page to show off to family/friends/non-ravelrers and ravelry is a much better interface for building this content than her current Wordpress solution.
Edit: ok, I've checked out the raw JSON data and looks quite possible. Thanks!
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#24My wife knew about this site, and she tells me that for a long time growth was somewhat hampered by their inability to scale. They had to manually allow users into the site in chunks (you email them your info, they email you the following Friday when you can finally post on the boards). He obviously had some hiccups, but he managed them well and learned as he went. That's an admirable quality. I completely agree with…
My wife knew about this site, and she tells me that for a long time growth was somewhat hampered by their inability to scale. They had to manually allow users into the site in chunks
It wouldn't surprise me if that "whoa, it's so busy that we have to queue to get in" factor actually contributed to its final success. I've seen it before with other apps. The "it's not really a big secret but it sorta is" beta of Stack Overflow was a little like that too. People wanna get into things they "can't" get into.
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#25My wife knew about this site, and she tells me that for a long time growth was somewhat hampered by their inability to scale. They had to manually allow users into the site in chunks (you email them your info, they email you the following Friday when you can finally post on the boards). He obviously had some hiccups, but he managed them well and learned as he went. That's an admirable quality. I completely agree with…
We had an automated invitation system - the usual, "put in your email, wait a while for the invite" thing. It was true that were only adding a couple hundred people a day during the early days. We weren't ready for more. We were so not prepared for the interest - it's funny to think back on it now. When we hit 5,000 users we were amazed. I think that we had actual performance issues for about a month (maybe a little…
Cool! Thanks for the info. It's nice reading about people's efforts to scale mid-to-large sites. All the press is on how the "giants" (Twitter, Facebook, etc) do it.
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#26I 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…
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Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#27Pretty 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).
I feel weird replying to all of these comments but here goes: We were worried about Cogent at the beginning so we only used them for delivering some static files and for non-critical outgoing traffic. It was initially an experiment - to save on our in-datacenter bandwidth and to compare with Amazon (a very inexpensive experiment) and we've been very happy with it. I think that we are doing about 20% of our traffic (+…
When you wanted customer input, what was the most effective way of getting it?
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#28I 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…
I have a couple ideas for startups in this space. Would love to know what you all think. Products/Companies that cater to a largely female, largely suburban audience have a tremendous amount of potential.
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel weird replying to all of these comments but here goes: We were worried about Cogent at the beginning so we only used them for delivering some static files and for non-critical outgoing traffic. It was initially an experiment - to save on our in-datacenter bandwidth and to compare with Amazon (a very inexpensive experiment) and we've been very happy with it. I think that we are doing about 20% of our traffic (+…
When you wanted customer input, what was the most effective way of getting it?
Input from users? Our forums - lots of time talking with our people in the forums. I wrote a little post about how we collect feedback here: http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2008/06/29/beta-testing-and-be...
Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
#30My wife knew about this site, and she tells me that for a long time growth was somewhat hampered by their inability to scale. They had to manually allow users into the site in chunks (you email them your info, they email you the following Friday when you can finally post on the boards). He obviously had some hiccups, but he managed them well and learned as he went. That's an admirable quality. I completely agree with…
My wife knew about this site, and she tells me that for a long time growth was somewhat hampered by their inability to scale. They had to manually allow users into the site in chunks It wouldn't surprise me if that "whoa, it's so busy that we have to queue to get in" factor actually contributed to its final success. I've seen it before with other apps. The "it's not really a big secret but it sorta is" beta of Stack…
Good point, that hadn't occurred to me.