[ANN] BuildingWebApps.com, new resource site for Rail developers

Rails
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 S.
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.