ADS Relaunches What's up in Ruby to Replace the RSS Reader

May 01, 2008

After the initial launch of What’s up in Ruby, people were confused about what we were trying to accomplish. They saw the site as another search engine specific to the Ruby space.

That was my fault.

The confusion was understandable. The design of the site emphasized search, and the initial post I did was off track. We got to work right away on these issues and today are launching a major update to What’s up in Ruby.

The goals of What’s up in Ruby, and the series of niche sites we are launching, are:

• Provide insight into the latest conversations going on within a context (topic)
• Take our visitors to where those conversations are taking place
• Allow our visitors to search for other conversation topics of interest to them, returning results that are only relevant to the context (i.e. not searching the entire Internet)

The updates we have done over the past week accomplish those goals. What we did was:

• Update the design to emphasize the conversation items
• Make the site perform a search when you click on a conversation item
• Return results ordered by the number of times the conversation item is used
• Add pagination to the results page to make browsing easier
• Run our feed pull every four hours so you have the freshest conversation
• All the code, all of it, is 100% Ruby and Ruby on Rails goodness

With this Beta 2 release we continue to choose all of the RSS feeds we pull. With 1.0 we will be asking for your suggestions of feeds that are relevant to the context. The more feeds we get the better the site becomes at informing of you what people are talking about.

Thank you all for your initial feedback on the site. Keep it coming!