Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

In which I join Ravelry

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Ravelry is a new social networking site for knitters, currently in beta. Most of my readers are probably going “huh?” at this point, and the rest, I hope, are going “ooh!” See, up front it sounds like a kind of dumb idea to have a squillion social networks for all your different interests, and why wouldn’t you just (for instance) join a knitting group on Facebook or Livejournal? Well, here’s why:

Ravelry lets you:

• list your projects, both in progress and completed
• integrate with Flickr to show pictures of your work
• record patterns and yarns used
• search other people’s projects
• plus, of course, the (by now) expected groups, forums, geographical user search, and so forth

What does this get you? Well, it means you can say “Hey, I have this pile of 12 ply alpaca in my stash, wonder what I can do with it?” and see suggestions for projects, read people’s tips for working with that yarn, or offer to swap it for some lace-weight silk/bamboo if you decide you really don’t want to use the alpaca after all.

Here’s a screenshot from the “Patterns” page. Click the thumbnail to enlarge. The pic above is one of the ones I uploaded to Flickr to illustrate my own projects.

Ravelry is slick as all get-out, with fantastic UI, cross-site integration (including the afore-mentioned Flickr), and a pretty solid userbase at this early stage. I’m deeply impressed and will look forward to using it plenty in future.

In short: knitters, sign up for a beta account; non-knitters, take note, because this is how it should be done.

Is there any way to get a beta account other than getting on the 5,861 person long waiting list?

Stuart, not that I’m aware of, but it only takes a week(ish) to get to the front of the queue. Put your name down anyway.

(Though I suppose if one were eg. wishing to write about them in the press, invest money in their endeavour, etc, one could write to the admins and request that they expedite one’s request.)