The Top 10 Ruby/Rails Blogs

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In my quest to whip my feed reader’s Ruby/Rails related content into shape a bit, I made a little research to find out which Ruby/Rails blogs are the most popular at the moment. I had given up on following most of the blogs systematically a long time ago – it is becoming increasingly hard to keep track of even the aggregators, not to talk about the blogs themselves. There are hundreds of Ruby/Rails blogs out there right now (I am talking about the ones found on the few most popular aggregators – in reality there must be much more of them), so it is clear that you need to pick carefully – unless you happen to be a well-paid, full time Ruby/Rails blog reader (in which case you still would have to crank a lot to do your work properly).

OK, enough nonsense for today – let’s see the results counting down from the 10th place! If you are interested in the method they were created with, or a longer, top 30 list from technorati and alexa, check out this blog entry.

10. http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/ by Jamis Buck.

jamisbuck

Jamis Buck “is a software developer who has the good fortune to be both employed by 37signals and counted among those who maintain the Ruby on Rails web framework”. He is mostly blogging about (surprise, surprise!) Rails – of course on a very high level, which could be expected from a Rails core developer. Very insightful posts on ActiveRecord, Capistrano and other essential Rails topics delivered in a professional way.

9. http://weblog.rubyonrails.org by the Rails core team

weblog_rubyonrails

This is the “default” Ruby on Rails blog, used for announcements, sightings, manuals and whatever else the RoR team finds interesting :-).

8. http://www.slash7.com by Amy Hoy.

slash7

This is a really cool little site – Amy is a very gifted writer and designer, publishing very insightful articles as well as the nicest (hands down!) cheat sheets about different Web2.0, Ajax, Rails and that sort of stuff. Definitely worth checking out!

7. http://errtheblog.com by PJ Hyett and Chris Wanstrath.

err_the_blog

A very serious blog of two Rails-geeks about advanced topics (but very well explained – so if you are not totally green (#00FF00) you should do fine). Among other things, they have contributed Sexy Migrations to Rails recently.

6. http://nubyonrails.com/ by Geoffrey Grosenbach

nubyonrails

Geoffrey is the author of more than twenty of Rails plugins, (including gruff, my favorite graph drawing gem), a horde of professional-quality articles and the PeepCode screencast site. Do I need to say more?!

5. http://redhanded.hobix.com/ by _why the lucky stiff.

redhanded

_why is probably the most interesting guy in the Ruby community. He is the author of (among tons of other things) Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby, HPricot, the coolest Ruby HTML parser, Try Ruby! (a must see!) and Hackety Hack, for aspiring wannabe programmers who want to hack like in the movies! The list goes on and on… This guy never stops. If someone will ever invent the perpetuum mobile, he will be it (in Ruby, of course).

4.http://hivelogic.com/ by Dan Benjamin.

hivelogic

Dan’s recent work include Cork’d, a web2.0 wine community site or the A List Apart publishing system. He does great podcasts with various guys.

3. http://mephistoblog.com/ by Rick Olson and Justin Palmer

mephisto

Personally I was quite surprised that a blog concentrating on such a narrow topic (in this case the mephisto blogging system) could grab the 3rd place – so I have checked both alexa and technorati by hand just to be sure, and it seems that everything is OK – mephistoblog is ranked very high on both of them, justifying this position. After all, mephisto is the leading blog system of Rails!

2. http://www.rubyinside.com/ by Peter Cooper.

rubyinside

This blog is my absolute favorite from this top 10 list (actually, from all the Ruby blogs I have encountered so far). I am definitely with Amy Hoy, who said If you had to subscribe to just one Ruby blog, it should be this one. If you would like to know what’s happening in the Ruby/Rails community, rubyinside is the place to check. If there is no new post here, it’s because most probably nothing happened!

And the winner is: http://www.loudthinking.com/ by David Heinemeier Hansson.

loudthinking

Well, what should I add? David is the author of Ruby on Rails, so no wonder his blog topped the list!


Conclusion
It’s interesting to note that nearly all the blogs listed here are mostly pure Rails ones – rubyinside (mixed Ruby/Rails) and redhanded (pure Ruby) being the two exceptions. It would be interesting to generate such a list for Ruby blogs – though I am not sure how. The sources I have used (most notably rubycorner) aggregate both Ruby and Rails blogs) – so it seems there are much more Rails bloggers out there (or they are much better (with the exception of _why) than the Ruby bloggers).

I would really like to hear your opinion on this little experiment – whether you think it makes sense or it is completely off, how could it be improved in the future, what features could be added etc. If I’ll receive some positive feedback, I think I will work on the algorithm a bit more, and run it once in say every 3 months to see what’s happening around the Ruby/Rails blogosphere. Let me know what do you think!

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134 thoughts on “The Top 10 Ruby/Rails Blogs”

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  3. You may be right… but please remember that this is not my opinion, but alexa + technorati stats together. If RedHanded is deprecated, we should see a serious drop if I run this experiment in, say 3 months… Maybe we will.

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  5. Haha, I’m very flattered that mephistoblog.com ranked so highly, but it’s only because most of the themes link back to the site 🙂

  6. Rick,

    Thanks for the explanation – I have suspected that something like this might be lurking in the background 😉

    I would like to detect and workaround exactly these type of things – (of course mephistoblog is great, but I’d like to provide blogs which are high ranked because of unique content).

    Any ideas how that might work?

    I am thinking of scraping the linkbacks from technorati and do something based on their authority/try to find some pattern… What do you think?

  7. Rick: That doesn’t explain the good Alexa rankings, however. You’re definitely getting a reasonable amount of visitors, so even if the official Mephisto isn’t a “top Ruby blog” in the traditional sense, it certainly is in an absolute sense 🙂

    And yeah, Redhanded is deprecated, but only just so, so it deserves to be in this list. It is likely to fall off, as you (Peter) say, within a certain period of time.

    Other tactics you could pursue, Peter, would be to get Compete ratings and possible FeedBurner subscriber counts (automatable – see this page for Ruby Inside’s numbers – just scrape a page for a FeedBurner ID, then try it on the FeedBurner awareness API). Subscriber count is the real biggie. Ruby Inside has a relatively poor Alexa and Technorati ranking for its subscriber count.. simply because we publish feed content feeds, so most readers never even visit us. You might also parse RSS feeds and note regularity of updates. If a blog updates every day, then that’s better than every 3 months, right? 🙂

  8. Peter: thanks for the ideas. I have been thinking about FeedBurner stats too, but not everybody has feedburner….
    Dr. Nic had a good idea in a similar vein: use bloglines or google feed reader to get the # of subscribed people. Generally I agree that subscriber count is king and that update frequency should be a vital part of the algorithm, too.

    Compete is cool, but e.g. rubyrailways is not on it’s radar so I am refusing to use it! (just kidding :-)). Yeah, I will check that out, too.

    Hm, plenty of work for the next few days 🙂

  9. Pingback: The Top 10 Ruby / Rails Blogs (and Why)

  10. I just realized.. the O’Reilly Ruby blog isn’t on here. However, it’s hard to add since it shares a domain with other blogs, so it has an unfair Alexa advantage (of 4,515!) because not all of that is for the Ruby blog. I am also not able to bring it up on Technorati.. and it has no FeedBurner numbers.. so it’s kinda hard to track.

  13. Wesley,

    This is not a subjective list – so it was not my decision to exclude The Rails Way (which I find fantastic, too, btw.). At the moment therailsway.com did not make it to the alexa top 30, and it was the 27th on the technorati top 30. That’s what the numbers say.

    However I am planning to beef up the algorithm with some improvements and generate the top list say monthly or weekly – I guess therailsway should go definitely up in the future!

  15. Thanks for doing this – as a relative newbie knowing what to read is a nightmare. I had read some of these blogs already but knowing which ARE the best ( most popular) is very, very helpful as I try to catch up as quickly as possible.

  16. Great stuff! I am really interested how will the list change if you run the crawling in the future… A monthly publication of results would be great. Thanks and keep up the great work!

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  30. Hi,

    i heard a lot about ruby on rail.
    its getting popularity day by day.
    what will be the future, does it take over PHP.

    any suggestions….

    thanks,

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