Unraveled

Hi all. I just posted an important letter to http://www.ravelry.com/tour/sad.

It’s linked the the front page that you see if you are logged out or if you don’t have an account.

Please – don’t make too much of a fuss over this. I don’t want to start any trouble, I just want to try and communicate with the people who are patiently waiting to get in.

I updated the site several times today and a nasty bug snuck in. Sorry about the 500 errors dudes.

I know that many of you have taken *really* nice photos of your stash yarn.

Ravelry needs featured photos for yarns and it will be a little while before we have time to go through and send a photo request for each yarn. So.. I opened things up a bit more and made it easy for people to send in their stash photos.

Share your pic by clicking the “Help! Ravelry needs a pretty photo.” link on any of your stashed yarn pages. If you don’t see the link, it means that someone else beat you to it. First one to click gets their photo in the spot :)

When we first let this secret out (almost 3 weeks ago?) we were *totally* unprepared for what would happen next. At first, we were nearly paralyzed by the volume of stuff – new data in ravelry, emails and contact us forms, tons of discussion threads..

Now that we are more organized and more clear headed, we are trying our best to make this site awesome. First order of business? Taking care of the issues that are keeping this thing in beta. I need to fix bugs (“crappers!” bugs and browser bugs), build better tools for editors and moderators, and make sure that managing the amount of data coming in is a snap. Oh, and the site needs to handle an assload of knitters and crocheters.

I know that lots of you have sent in your bugs, requests, and ideas and most of those are still somewhere on The List. I’m confident that our progress during the next couple months will be just as fast as Ravelry’s first 3 months but I think that a lot of the work that I am doing right now will be somewhat invisible. So – I just wanted so say a bunch of thank yous..

* Thanks to the folks with IE6, Safari, and Opera! There will be lots more of you when the site opens. Thanks for the bug reports and for all of your patience. You’ve been dealing with some annoying issues for far too long.

* Thanks to the crocheters – we want you to feel like the first class citizens that you are and I know that we aren’t there yet.

* Thanks to everyone outside of the US. We’re still not international enough when it comes to currency, the metric system, conversions, and even books. We certainly don’t want to be US centric – we just needed outside help (which we have plenty of now!)

* Thanks to everyone who has ever seen a “Crappers!” error message. Your misfortunes produce a wonderfully detailed bug report.

* Thank you thank you designers, dyers, and spinners! We want to do so much more for you and we are so happy that you want to be a part of this. I’m really excited about the future – I’ll be proud to help get some exposure and sales for indie crafters.

* Thanks for everyone who has spent time jotting down their ideas in the forums. I read every single post (although I don’t always reply) and I’ve received a ton of valuable feedback and many great ideas for improvements.

* Thank you editors, moderators, and community members who have been flagging, checking, cleaning, and merging data. In less than 1 week, duplicates have been disappearing like crazy and 29% of our 3800 patterns have been checked and approved. This is AWESOME. We were not ready to the amount of data that came in and I’m so grateful that you guys have helped clean up the mess. The beta testing has helped us learn and formulate a plan but the expense was a large amount of stuff that needed to be sifted through. I’m working on improving the site so it is easier to manage and harder to dirty up. You guys need a rest :)

* Thank you to each and every Ravelry user. The site is nothing without your contributions – every time you enter a project, you make the site better.

PS – the blog that is behind this newsfeed is yet another unfinished task. Someday it will be the official Ravelry mouthpiece. You can comment, if you come in the back door: http://blog.ravelry.com

Just a quick note to let you guys know that Casey and I are not going to be around today. Casey’s 94 year old grandfather had a stroke last night and we are with him.

Thank you…

Hi, everybody!

Just a quick post as I am working on getting our wonderful, gorgeous, hard-working, fabulous (is it working?) pattern Admin volunteers in so that they can get the pattern info all sorted out. (yaay! No more duplicates!)

We have had quite a few requests for invitations from you guys and we will definitely be handing out some invites to you fairly soon. I know your friends are getting antsy!

The reasons we are waiting a little bit:

– I would like to have the pattern and yarn information in a good place before we double the number of users in here (go Admins go!)

– Casey is working on making the site faster so that we can actually handle that many more users

– We want to be fair to the 4500 people on the invite request list. Some of them have been waiting for over a week to get in here.

So… yeah.

Thanks again, everyone! We really appreciate all your support and are so glad that you are enjoying the site!

Oopsie – I pushed the wrong button. I apologize if any of you were rudely interrupted by an Internal Server Error between 4:05 and 4:08 PM Eastern time.

Hey everyone! So tonight is the first night in I-don’t-know-how-many weeks that I haven’t added new features to Ravelry.

Jess and I went to the Burren and then Redbones (I know there are a few Bostonians lurking around here) to drink beer and eat BBQ. We didn’t think that we could do it, but in the end taking a break from Ravelry wasn’t *that* hard ;) Jess is easily swayed – she loves her some okra and buffalo shrimp.

I hope that you all are had an excellent Friday night!

…okay, I admit it – I did add one small feature to the site. Jessica made me tell you.

You guys have sure been busy in here- so great to see everyone adding projects and using the site. :)

I had so much fun in Maryland- thanks to all the Ravelers who came over to say hello. It was awesome to walk around the festival seeing all the buttons!

Few quick notes here before I fall asleep on my keyboard:

1. One thing that would help us out enormously is if you guys could use the forum to keep track of bugs and ideas for Ravelry. I am spending a lot of my time taking emails from you guys and reordering them into categories. It would be awesome if you could use the Ravelry topic in the forum to categorize things for me- at least until we get a new system in place. (Thanks for the idea, Kelly Sue!)

2. I have heard from a couple people that the natives out in blogland are getting restless- getting upset that it is taking longer than they would like to get into Ravelry. We would be so grateful if you could assure anyone you hear getting grumpy that we are inviting people every day and we really appreciate their patience. The list of requests topped out at 3,000 this evening. Casey is doing the best he can to get everything ready for that large a group on here but he does work a full time day job and is staying up every night until the wee hours as it is.

Maybe we should have had you guys wait a bit longer before posting on your blogs about the site but, honestly, we never realized how quickly the idea would catch on! Dealing with bugs in a new website is not fun and I am surprised that many people would want to deal with it. Anyway… Live and learn.

3. Finally, I was wondering if any of my fellow Type A’s would be willing to help out here as a Moderator. A couple weeks ago, I was able to keep up with the influx of pattern and yarn info- making sure the information was correct and as complete as it could be, clearing up duplicates, etc.

Now, though, it is too big for me to handle on my own. So, do any of you have any time to help moderate the pattern and yarn info? We will be adding more moderation tools very soon and I just thought I would get the question out there.

If you would like to help out, and are anal, ahem, detail- oriented, please go to this thread and let me know!

Thanks so much, everybody! We really appreciate all the feedback and emails- we are doing our best to respond as quickly as we can.

Casey and I are leaving for the airport in a little bit- me to go to Maryland Sheep and Wool (woohoo!) and Casey to visit his friend in Baltimore.

So… our internet connection throughout the weekend will be spotty at best. Everyone play nice now, ya hear? :)

One quick request: We really do want to hear feedback and suggestions on the site but it would really help us out if you could send us just one email for the weekend. Keep the window open and add a few things at a time… That would help enormously.

Some people had some questions about invitations. Casey and I will be inviting more folks from the invite request list sometime next week. The list is very long (2,000 people!!) so it may be a little bit before we assign you guys more invitations to give out. We also want to be fair to the people that have signed up for an invitation. (Although your beta tester invites will still be fully operational while we are gone.)

Please come say hi if you are at Maryland- I will be there with my Ravelry tote bag and have some Ravelry buttons to give out!!

Oh and please know that we tried to respond to all the emails and suggestions that you guys sent us- if you didn’t hear a response, we read your message and will certainly get back to you as soon as we can! One quick thing, please also check out the information on the front page in the “help! help! where am I?” box, some of your questions can be answered there. (I know there is a lot of text but please do read them.)

Thanks so much everyone! Casey and I have just been blown away by the support of the community- I cried yesterday because I was so happy.