BuildingWebApps.com, new resource site for Rail developers

rubyonrails-talk
1

My partner Christopher Haupt and I have been working for several months on a new resource site for Ruby on Rails developers, www.BuildingWebApps.com. This is still very much a work in progress, but we've gone ahead and opened it up so we can get feedback. If you're willing to spend a few minutes to take a look and let us know what you think, we'd be grateful.

Our goal is to build this site into a valuable resource for the Rails community. The site includes both original articles (just a few now, many more to come) and an annotated, organized set of links to hundreds of other resources around the web.

We're in the early phases of building up the content, so we realize that it will seem a little thin in places. We're most interested at this point in feedback on the usability of the site. And if you're interested in contributing articles, please let us know.

In case you're curious about the business model -- we plan to make all of the core content free indefinitely. At some point, we'll add some premium content that will require membership or a one-time payment. For now, we're generating revenue through seminars. Longer term, we believe that the app we're building to run this site will have application to many other knowledge domains and communities.

Thanks, Michael Slater www.BuildingWebApps.com www.LearningRails.com

2

I have seen your site before and have gone through parts of it before. Here's my candid feedback:

- Home page was too much for me to digest. I almost left but I saw the articles link in the nav, clicked it and found that to be much more digestible.

- Podcast was awesome overall. I only listened to one and remember thinking that it's hard to follow w/ only audio. Consider creating slides for them and using slideshare.com thingie (embeding into your site of course) so people can follow along a little easier.

3

Michael,

I think it looks great and agree with you on the scarcity of articles. But as you said there will be many more to come so that won't be an issue. I think the podcast is good too, keep up the great work.