Unraveled

It’s been nearly 4 months since Jess told the world about Ravelry on May 2nd. Boy are we tired!

Those of you who are still waiting have been very patient and Jess and I really appreciate it. There are 8300 Ravelers now and I know that it can be kind of difficult when people blog about a project, pattern, yarn, or discussion that they saw on Ravelry and you can’t get in and take a look.

Many people have asked about our launch date – when will we be open to the public? I can’t give you an exact day right now but I can tell you what our current plans are. It’s going to go like this:

• Our servers are shipping on Monday and our network hardware is already starting to arrive. The datacenter is going to start billing us in about 10 days (ready or not) so I’m going to get our stuff set up and installed as soon as possible.
• Once we are in our new home, some beta people are going to help test before we flip the switch and move Ravelry over to our grown-up servers. Testing will probably take 2 days or so.
• Next, we’ll crank up the invites. I’m hoping to send 5,000 invites during the first week in our new place.
• Jess and I and the volunteer editors will need to adapt and tweak things as people start flooding in. We’re still trying to perfect our techniques for dealing with email and other feedback. The volunteer editors and I are still working on improvements to the parts of the site that deal with user contributions.
• Everything will go according to plan and we’ll add another 5,000 the following week ;)

oh that reminds me – for those of you that voted on names for our servers: the “Fiber Arts Terms that Make Pretty Good Names” (Hank, Steek, Tink, Frog, Swift, Hook) are currently winning :)

I’ve got some screenshots in the hopper and I’ll try to post them soon. For now, I’ll leave you some Bob pictures.

First, the official Bob Intervention. Sometimes online discussions can get heated (I know! It’s hard to believe! haha) and talks that that involve Harry Potter, doubly so. Bob, the official Ravelry mascot, swoops in and makes an appearance when necessary.

Also, I’ve retired the lolbob that used to appear during the nightly site updates. Too many people were frightened by the 1 AM Eastern time appearance of a crazy snaggletoothed dog.

(Don’t worry – Bob isn’t plastered all over Ravelry!)