HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do people keep finding my gem?

9 points by randrews ↗ HN
I've written a few programs, mostly just for fun, and never bothered to advertise them heavily. Nobody's paid attention, which is about what I expected. Then I wrote this:

http://rubygems.org/gems/groundwork

429 downloads right now. And I don't know how that happened. At first I figured, well, it shows up on the "recently added" list, but then they just kept coming. As an experiment I uploaded another one:

http://rubygems.org/gems/clean

And it had the lack of interest I'd expected.

So I guess my question is, now what? These 429 people like my thing, how can I find out why, so I can learn how to improve it, or make more things like it, or whatever? Nobody's following the project on Github, nobody's emailed me or anything. How do I get in touch with my users?

4 comments

[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 16.4 ms ] thread
cmelbye
I've been wondering the same thing. I'd bet that they're coming from a search engine. I routinely search on Google for something I need to do using Ruby. Almost always there's a result for a Gemcutter gem that does what I need to do, and that's how I find them.
randrews
That's a nicer theory than my current one, which was that some guy with a lot of EC2 instances put "gem install groundwork" in a chef script for setting them up. :)

I've tried googling a few different things though, and couldn't get myself to come up on the first page. Is there a way to make Google tell me what terms led there?

cmelbye
Google Analytics, but since you don't control rubygems.org you might need to ask Nick Quaranto, the admin and creator of the site.
coryl
Google your keywords, maybe a blogger wrote about it or something.