Thanks for the kind words and suggestions, folks. I will give those a shot. I submitted it to /r/ruby and to Hacker News. If you enjoyed the post and have an account, you could go vote on those submissions -- here's the Reddit post[1], but Hacker News frowns upon direct linking so you'll have to go look for it in the new section[2] under "Fix your Ruby environment problems".
Social news sites are clearly an important point of dissemination, and I've submitted past work there with wildly varying degrees of success. My biggest complaint with them is this: to get any significant traffic you need your link on the front page, which requires a sustained high level of upvoting that only happens when you're *on* the front page; to reach the front page in the first place requires a few upvotes *very* early in the link's lifetime. Maybe 5 people* will see your link while it passes through the New section in a flood of other material, so if you leave it up to the site's own processes, it's pretty much random chance whether enough of those people will upvote it to give it the initial kick into the front page with the vastly larger audience. It's only a meritocracy *after* that. And the alternatives to taking your chances are to engage in a clandestine voting ring, or to promote the submission through other channels (essentially what I'm doing now). I don't have the energy or will to do that on a regular basis, so I end up feeling very ambivalent about submitting to these sites. * Not exaggerating. Based on links that have died in New and the referrer traffic I get on those links, the number of people that view any given non-front-page submission are incredibly low. On Thu, Oct 30, 2014, at 05:13 PM, bradleyland wrote: > I second Ylan's suggestion to share with broadcasters of Ruby > podcasts. You might also (*gulp*) try submitting to Hacker News > (https://news.ycombinator.com). The comments over there are mixed. The > problem with HN is that no one is willing to be a generous reader. > It's like being contrarian is a badge of honor, so the comments > usually smell of condescension. However, that's a vocal few. I've seen > some pretty good traffic from HN in the past. > > On Wednesday, October 29, 2014 7:03:20 PM UTC-4, Ian Young wrote: >> Hey all, >> >> I just published a blog post on solving common Ruby environment >> problems[3], like the oh-so-frequent "you have activated version >> x.y.z of this gem, but..." Bundler issue. I hope some of you find it >> useful - it seems like environment problems bite people pretty >> regularly, and understanding what's going on should go a long ways >> towards avoiding these issues. >> >> This is sort of the second in a series of answers to the questions >> and complaints I hear most often from people who are new(ish) to >> Ruby/Rails. The first was a post about migrations and schema, and why >> it makes sense to check in schema.rb[4]. I figure there are enough >> how-to instructionals in the world, so I'm aiming instead to explain >> *why* these practices are good. Target audience is the new-to-Rails >> but not entirely-new-to-programming crowd - the inquisitive folks who >> grumble when they're prescribed these rituals without being given the >> context to understand why it makes sense. >> >> Does anyone have thoughts on how I might reach more people who could >> benefit from this? I'd like my work to be useful to as many people as >> possible, but I'm not approaching this with enough ambition to engage >> in extended brand-building or anything. Do people still use those >> "planet" blog aggregators? Are there other distribution channels that >> work in a similar way? >> >> Ian > > -- > -- > SD Ruby mailing list > sdruby@googlegroups.com > http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SD Ruby" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sdruby+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. Links: 1. http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/2kwfc0/fix_your_ruby_environment_problems/ 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/newest 3. http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/if-youre-having-ruby-environment-problems-i-feel-bad-for-you-son.html 4. http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-09-10-rails-migrations-and-schema.html -- -- SD Ruby mailing list sdruby@googlegroups.com http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SD Ruby" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sdruby+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
