This is great!
As someone who is currently diving into Rails it's certainly really helpful and inspiring.
Extra kudos for the Github repo.
I Built a Social Network for Food and Here’s How I Did it
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Re: I Built a Social Network for Food and Here’s How I Did it
#72Interesting on a few levels. One, the learning curve by Jennifer is impressive, going from a site to change background color in the beginning to yumhacker. Yeah there is a ways to go in functionality, but that is a cool start. (of course Facebook probably sucks the air out of other social networks, but that's really not the point.)
But what I really find more impressive is that yumhacker seems to have a good amount of initial users. I've found the easy part in launching a webapp is building it, but the getting of users is really the hard part. That is the testament to the power of a unique marketing idea (which probably did not start as marketing) of deciding to learn web design and throwing up a blog with a catchy title, ie, 180 websites in 180 days. Now that she has raised her profile a bit and has some eyeballs on her, she is able to make something a bit more worthwhile and attract users to it as well.
Re: I Built a Social Network for Food and Here’s How I Did it
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are your thoughts on how to attract users to your projects?
That's the next thing I get to explore and I'll definitely be asking for plenty of advice. One thing I plan to do is go out and talk to people who love exploring new restaurants. Bloggers, critics, chefs and just people who generally love food. I'm also thinking about different features that could help provide value while the site is still small, such as custom lists. But mostly, I expect it will be a lot of trial an…
Check out meetup.com, which tends to have groups that like to get together in different towns for different culinary experiences. You know the users are ripe for using the web to discover new dining experiences.
You are right about review sites like Yelp, I really have never found a very useful restaurant review site, every restaurant seems to have great reviews and every one has bad reviews.