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Scribd is now the largest Rails site on the Internet (using Alexa rankings)

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Re: Scribd is now the largest Rails site on the Internet (using Alexa rankings)

#21

Post by xlnt »

amichail wrote: post #19
xlnt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i never liked acrobat reader on windows much. maybe that's it? or people just don't know where to host their pdfs. or don't know how to make pdfs.

So maybe the popularity comes out of ignorance?

yes. but that's not necessarily a bad thing to say about scribd. if scribd makes it easier for people to not know anything about how to use computers, then that's valuable to lots of people.

Re: Scribd is now the largest Rails site on the Internet (using Alexa rankings)

#22

Post by amichail »

xlnt wrote: post #21
amichail wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So maybe the popularity comes out of ignorance?

yes. but that's not necessarily a bad thing to say about scribd. if scribd makes it easier for people to not know anything about how to use computers, then that's valuable to lots of people.

Scribd should win some award for being the most counterintuitive successful startup. It's hard to imagine that computer science majors came up with this idea!

Re: Scribd is now the largest Rails site on the Internet (using Alexa rankings)

#23

Post by xlnt »

amichail wrote: post #22
xlnt wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. but that's not necessarily a bad thing to say about scribd. if scribd makes it easier for people to not know anything about how to use computers, then that's valuable to lots of people.

Scribd should win some award for being the most counterintuitive successful startup. It's hard to imagine that computer science majors came up with this idea!

youtube doesn't do much besides make a few things easy: make a file web accessible and convert to another format and provide comments and some text people can paste to embed it, and i guess favorites and a bit more -- all the kinds of things scribd has i think. plus give away free storage space and bandwidth, which scribd does too.

Re: Scribd is now the largest Rails site on the Internet (using Alexa rankings)

#27

Post by tlrobinson »

That's great for Scribd, not so great for Rails. The largest (known) Rails site isn't even in the top 500!

I'm curious how this compares to other technologies. Someone should write a script that crawls the top sites attempting to detect the technologies they're built on.

I can think of a few heuristics, like URL patterns and file extensions (.php, etc) and cookies (PHPSESSID for PHP, _session_id for Rails, JSESSIONID for J2EE, etc)

Re: Scribd is now the largest Rails site on the Internet (using Alexa rankings)

#28

Post by [deleted] »

ken wrote: post #9
sdurkin wrote: post #6

The first time I used Scribd's iPaper I thought, "This is magic." Its one of those products that, as a web developer, you'd have to be stupid not to use. Its simply that much better than its competitors. Congratulations, guys.

Can you explain the magic? I just don't get it. (Maybe I am stupid; I'll admit that much.) From what I've seen, it looks like a Flash plugin to view PDFs. It breaks my scroll-wheel and keyboard shortcuts, uses funny-looking controls, and it takes as long to load the Flash plugin as it would have to just load the whole PDF. I always edit the URL so I can view the PDF normally. I don't know why I'd want to do this to m…

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