Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other?

Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by whalesalad on Saturday August 08, 2009 @07:21PM (#749986)

Django, http://schoolrack.com

We (the developers) are actually beginning to feel like it's one of the biggest Django sites on the interweb right now. Definitely not trying to toot my own horn here, but we're gaining users like mad and traffic is insane.

Disclaimer: I figure the OP's question is more directed at HN members rather than YC startups, but for the record we're not a YC startup

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by aaroneous on Saturday August 08, 2009 @08:01PM (#750045)

Sorry to call you out, but your directly quantified Quantcast results show you at less than 1k uniques per day.

There are a LOT of Django sites out there with considerably more traffic and it misrepresents the size of the Django community to suggest that, "one of the biggest Django sites" is only serving a few hundred hits a day.

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by whalesalad on Saturday August 08, 2009 @09:59PM (#750179)

We get a lot less traffic during the summer months (school isn't in session) and towards the end of the year for the holidays... but we do get quite more traffic than our quantcast page suggests.

It does look like I was totally full of my own shit though, we're clearly not that big when it comes to the other Django sites out there.

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by snprbob86 on Saturday August 08, 2009 @10:13PM (#750195)

It looks like an average of 50,000 monthly uniques when school is in session. Do you mind sharing your actual numbers?

And can you hazard a guess why Quantcast is so inaccurate? It seems curious, considering you have their javascript tracking code on every page of your site. If their tracker is so broken, why use them and not Google Analytics?

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by jacquesm on Saturday August 08, 2009 @10:27PM (#750206)

Uniques monthly is totally meaningless.

This comes up with some frequency. Uniques daily * 30 != uniques monthly, after all, if you undouble on a monthly basis and you get 30K visitors each day and they're all different it looks like you have a cool 900K uniques monthly. But at the same time it means you are completely not sticky! All your users are replaced by new ones every single day.

A better measure is uniques daily, daily growth in uniques and compare that with your uniques monthly. If you're doing it right you should see (30average repeats) + (30average growth)

Those are figures that you can do some planning on. Monthly uniques does not do anything other than look good on paper. Bad websites look even better :)

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by snprbob86 on Saturday August 08, 2009 @11:12PM (#750269)

As I understand it, Quantcast's monthly uniques is the totally number of different users to visit the site during that month. I assumed that daily uniques were meaningless because of the nature of SchoolRack. Not every student logs in every day. It seemed reasonable to assume that a month is a reasonable amount of time for most students, teachers, and parents to login at least once. This tells you the actual number of people who actively use such a service.

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by jacquesm on Saturday August 08, 2009 @11:23PM (#750280)

only if you put the stats script on the pages behind the login and not on the others.

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by jacquesm on Saturday August 08, 2009 @09:04PM (#750120)

I believe the OP, I don't mind sharing my own stats, we're somewhere between 10 and 15 K uniques daily, google has us pegged at about 100k uniques (don't ask me what they're smoking there, probably something to do with subdomains), here is the alexa graph comparing ww.com and schoolrack.com, you can draw your own conclusions.

http://alexa.com/siteinfo/schoolrack.com+ww.com

A tripling of your traffic in 30 days during the 'off' season is a pretty good showing in my book, as long as it wasn't when coming from '10' users to '30' users :)

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by aaroneous on Saturday August 08, 2009 @09:27PM (#750139)

Quantcast's "Directly Quantified" stats come from the publisher embedding Quantcast's js tracking on their site - so it's kind of like making your Google Analytics data public.

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by ubernostrum on Saturday August 08, 2009 @10:20PM (#750202)

Comparing Quantcast's estimates to the actual stats for a few sites I run (and have access to full logs/anayltics for) shows that Quantcast is severely (read: at least one order of magnitude in a couple cases) lowballing.

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by apsurd on Saturday August 08, 2009 @07:38PM (#750009)

just a heads up: on the about page this sentence -> Our mission from the onset has been to seamlessly connecting teachers, students, and parents through the Internet.

should be "to seamlessly connect..." ?

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by whalesalad on Saturday August 08, 2009 @10:06PM (#750186)

Thanks for the heads up, just updated the servers.

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by leif on Saturday August 08, 2009 @08:11PM (#750061)

oh thank god please please PLEASE kill blackboard

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by siong1987 on Saturday August 08, 2009 @09:39PM (#750158)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/886221/does-django-scale

Look at the first answer. It seems like there are bigger django websites out there.

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by gaia-forming on Saturday August 08, 2009 @07:50PM (#750024)

Looking at the site, I have no doubts that you are doing well.

Very nice, I congratulate you. You have found a niche, and your execution is top notch.

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Re:Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other? by jacquesm on Saturday August 08, 2009 @07:25PM (#749991)

Nice to see you gaining ground so fast during the holiday season, makes you wonder how it will go once school starts!

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