

Ask HN: How do people keep finding my gem? - randrews

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:<p>http://rubygems.org/gems/groundwork<p>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:<p>http://rubygems.org/gems/clean<p>And it had the lack of interest I'd expected.<p>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?
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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.

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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?

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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.

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coryl
Google your keywords, maybe a blogger wrote about it or something.

