Unraveled

Hey guys,

I made a change to the search at 2am Eastern and I woke up to find that it didn’t go so well. If any of you ran into any error messages this morning, I apologize. It’s all fixed now.

Also, the survey was sooo useful that I added a new 2 Question Survey. (It’s related to photos) Thanks!

What a day!

Thanks so much everyone for the wonderful blog posts about Ravelry. It is certainly getting the word out about the site!! We have over 600 people on the invite request list- a little overwhelming, but in a good way! We really, really appreciate all your help.

Just to give you an idea… In one day, we have jumped from 100 to 220 users. yay! We are sending out invitations to the waiting list; we sent out 150 today and will be doing more. If you do hear any questions about people getting into Ravelry, can you guys assure them that we are inviting people on a regular basis from that sign up list on the front page? Appreciate any help you can provide as Casey and I can only type so fast over here. ;)

We also assigned all of you guys new invites earlier this afternoon- they appeared on the top, right corner. If you signed in after that, we will be giving out more fairly soon. It may be after this weekend though since Casey and I will both be out of town- me at Maryland Sheep and Wool (woohoo!) and Casey visiting his friend in Baltimore.

MOST IMPORTANT! Can you guys give us 5 minutes of your time to fill out this little survey for us? It is 4 questions. Please? huh? huh?

Quick update from Casey: As of 5:30pm Eastern, we’ve received 94 surveys. You guys are awesome!! Oh, and FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE projects were added today. You guys are Raveling when you should be working, aren’t you?

As always, want to say a warm welcome to all the new Ravelers! So happy to have you here- hope the site is fun so far. :) I know I have really enjoyed seeing all the new people, yarns, and projects!

So, what’s up?! Well, lots actually!

1. Casey has put together a new Discuss section- a kind of forum. It is going to be linked into the pattern and yarn pages so that everything on the site flows together and info is easy to find. Post a new topic! Respond to the ones that are up there! I am already having fun with it myself. (Great idea, Kelly Sue!)

2. We are finally ready to come out of the closet! Sorta. Casey made a new login page the other day so that people coming by can get an idea what the site is all about and new folks can also sign up for an invite.

So… you can write about Ravelry on your blog if you want! Yaay! My heart is beating all fast just thinking about it. haha

It would be super helpful if you told people what you like about it and you can link people back to our main page. As I said, we have a button there where friends can sign in for an invite. The only reason we are doing it this way is so we can grow a bit gradually… so that Casey and won’t lose our minds over here! Everyone is welcome though!!

We will also be assigning all you beta testers some more invites- so keep an eye on here when that is ready. I will do another quick post or an email.

In pure blogger style, here are three quick badges that Casey threw together to put on your sidebar. We will have other badges soon and more blog integration once we are all open to the public (will be within the next couple weeks). We are thinking probably something like little pics of your projects, etc.

3. You know what is one of the most fun parts of having your own website? SWAG, baby. :) I got a bunch of stuff to hand out at Maryland Sheep & Wool- some buttons and some little cards for me. woohoo!

The buttons are from the fabulous folks at Button Arcade– they were super nice and made some awesome buttons for us, really quickly. (Thanks, Adrian!)

The silly “business cards” are actually the famous Moo Cards. I am totally addicted now and need more. ;) They are so tiny and smooth feeling. The printing is great too- very crisp.

4. Speaking of Maryland Sheep and Wool... who is going?? Would you guys be willing to pimp out Ravelry to people you see and meet? We have 500 buttons so I can hand them out to you guys to give away. Anybody up for that?

Contact me, and we can figure out how to meet up! You can also go to the discussion thread I started here to talk!

If you see me at the festival, I will be the short- haired geek with the big Ravelry tote bag. Awwww, yeah. ;)

So some people are having issues reading their messages… Casey will be taking a look at this problem as soon as he gets home tonight!

Thanks for letting us know it was giving you trouble.

Sorry for any inconvenience!

___

UPDATE: Casey fixed the message problem. For some reason, it was not allowing people without invites left to view messages. Sheesh! That will teach you for doing what we ask… haha

So you should be able to open up messages no problem now- let us know if anything weird happens!!

Thanks for your patience!

Welcome to all the new folks! So happy to have you join us!

I have a bit of a long update this time… That will teach me for procrastinating.

First off, Casey and I thought you guys might want to see how much we’ve grown! Right now, Ravelry has:

– 90 active users – 22 designers, 11 yarn dyers/spinners
– 1146 projects
– 855 patterns
– 2668 photos
– 542 stashed yarns (1656 skeins)
– 639 needles
– 328 blog posts linked

Wowee! :)

Second, we just wanted to say a quick thank you to the following groups, as we are developing these sections of the site:

– Ravelers outside the U.S.
– Crocheters
– Designers
– Yarn Dyers and Spinners

You guys have been very patient as we are adding new features and we really appreciate it. Please let us know if there is something you think would make the site easier to use or more welcoming. Feedback, as always, is welcome.

So, what’s new?
1. Messaging system. You may have noticed a little ‘new message’ tag in the top right corner of the header. You can now send messages to other Ravelers right on the site and get notifications for comments, favorites and friends.

2. We forgot to add a way to delete from your stash- now you can do that by putting your mouse under the yarn pic and clicking the trashcan.

3. Casey has been working to get Ravelry to work in IE- he thinks he got the majority of bugs so let him know if you are an Internet Explorer user and notice anything strange.

4. He also started putting together more stash stuff: you can now mark yarn as: “stashed, used up, willing to trade/ sell, traded/ tossed) We are hoping to have a kind of market area where all the marked yarn shows up for sale or trade. We just put that up tonight so let us know what you think.

5. I am working on connecting some pictures on the site- you may have some messages from me requesting to use your project image as the official photo for the pattern on Ravelry. You do not have to feel obligated to say okay but it does help the site be more helpful for searching for patterns if there are pictures, obviously.

6. Casey updated the yarn dyers/ spinners portfolio pages. You guys can now add your logo, yarn website and description to your yarn brand pages. Don’t forget that you can also add pictures in for your individual yarns from Flickr and you can edit your yarn information as well.

7. Some of you have asked if we will be doing anything for spinners and we definitely will be doing that soon… Adding fiber to stash, more handspun info, etc. Any suggestions on what else is needed?

So that is about it! We will be updating a little more often so I don’t have these super long posts…

Oh one last thing! Casey and I have been just blown away by the support and encouragement- thanks so much. We are so happy to have people in here and enjoying the site! We will be giving out some more invitations fairly soon so think if there is anyone else you know who would be interested in helping…

Okay, you may have noticed that our project pictures are all gone- that is because Flickr seems to be down at the moment…

Just an fyi.

Also a good learning experience, yet again… guess we need to have a cache of the photos. ;)

__

Update: Apparently, it is just a problem with Comcast. Gah.

Hi, everyone!

I just wanted to say a huuuuge THANK YOU to all of you for helping us get our baby website on its feet! We have come such a long way in a short time and it is all because of you guys!

We are at the point now that we would like to take another step toward opening the website for good: we have given each of you 3 invitations to share with your friends.

The only thing we ask is to use these invites carefully- we really need people at this point who have the time and interest to use the site. You can find your invitations on the top right corner of the header in Ravelry, by the logout button.

Oh- and a couple boring bits:

– Please don’t forget to rate the patterns and yarns in your project detail pages- we noticed that some people are not using them… You can find them in the boxes to the right of your project info- it brings the boxes up as soon as you have saved a project with a pattern and yarn.

– If you have not done so already, please subscribe to this Ravelry news blog using
your favorite newsreader (Bloglines, Google Reader, etc) at http://www.ravelry.com/news.rss. Casey and I hope is a much better way for us to keep you guys updated on new features and news, rather than sending e-mails.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know! We really appreciate
everyone’s feedback.

Thank you! We are so excited to see some more new faces!!! :)

Hi, everyone! Been a while since my last update but, don’t worry… we have been working very hard!

Want to say first a quick welcome to all the new folks! We have some great new knitters, independent dyers, and designers who have joined our growing community. Casey and I would like to thank everyone also for their continued feedback as we are getting the site pulled together. We really appreciate all the comments- positive and um, constructive. :)

So… what have we been doing all this time?

1. Casey put together a nifty pattern browser- click on the type of pattern on the pattern page and you can search by star rating, yarn weight, etc…

2. He also has been working a slideshow and picture zoom feature. The little square thumbnails make the site look pretty but we really need to be able to see as much detail as possible, right? (Here is Elinor‘s beautiful Winter Sunrise Hat and little Beatrix- aww!)

We will be adding more detail and links to this screen in the future. To get to the slideshow, click on the little slideshow button on the top right hand corner of a fellow Raveler’s project notebook.

3. Casey also added a needle and hook inventory sheet to our project notebooks. Now you can really know how many needles you have. (haha, if you want to!) You can put detail into it, like what kind of needle or hook it is. (addi, britanny, bamboo, crappy, etc.) You can also print out this sheet to carry in your wallet! (That printable sheet does still need some tweaking but it works.)

Thanks again, everyone! Be in touch with any problems or questions!!

Casey set up a little tool to enable Ravelry to talk with your blogs!

Now when you log in to Ravelry, it should give you a message underneath the toolbar in your Notebook that you have blog posts to attach to particular projects. You can also do this by going to the Blog Posts tab in your Notebook.

After April 1, (when we have Ravelry open for business) you can just post a link to your project in a blog post and Ravelry will pick it up. Like magic!

Casey is busy working on some not so exciting, but much needed update: adding more than one yarn to projects. He wanted to work on a fancy-shmancy photo slideshow thing but sometimes code monkey does not get what he wants.

Poor Code Monkey.

[Update: Casey put in the changes to make it possible to add more than one yarn to a project. You may encounter some bugs- let us know if you do and we will fix it asap!]

I ordered Ravelry’s server today after having a small panic attack (did anyone else get that newsletter from Interweave’s future Knitting Daily site?).  I was expecting to wait a few days for my machine but the fabulous kiwis over at Rimuhosting had the thing ready for me within a few hours! I haven’t moved the site to it’s new home yet – it’ll happen soon.

What does this mean? It means that the bills are going to start coming in, so we’ve got to get Ravelry opened up as soon as we can! I’m hoping that we can start passing out invites to you guys sometime next week.

In the meantime, I’m still plugging away on new and improved features. Send us a note if you want to add anything to my Big List o’ Task – I don’t mind.

Talk to you guys later…. Have a good weekend.