Squareknot

Create and share beautiful, step-by-step guides for anything

5 followers

Create and share beautiful, step-by-step guides for anything

5 followers

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Knowledge base software

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Design & Creative

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Online learning

Launch tags:Design Tools•Prototyping•Tech

Launch Team

Talllly

This is pretty cool. Great design. Is there a way to ask questions about a particular step in the process?

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11yr ago

CollX

Maker

@alexgorstan thanks! There is totally a way to ask questions - every step has its own comments thread. You can find it at the bottom of each step! Click "Comments" to toggle the comments thread.

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11yr ago

Streamalong

Congrats on the launch @goldenchaos. Love that it's not just another "how-to" site. The ability to branch and comment on steps is great. I'm really interested to see how people will use the branching, especially for food-related items. There are already some good examples of how you can start with one recipe, get to a certain point, and then branch off to create a completely different dish. I could see people using this to create a "genome project" of sorts to show how different types of dishes are related. Great work.

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11yr ago

CollX

Maker

@chuise yes! And the massive potential to visualize the tree in tons of different ways makes me reaaaaaaaally want to release an API for Squareknot. One step at a time...

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11yr ago

I really, really like this idea/concept!! Great job @goldenchaos! I assume that as you scale/get more data, that users will be able to sort by category, most views, highest rated, etc. I think that is what I'm missing right now from a user perspective. I love it though. I'd be interested in signing-up for some sort of weekly e-mail that highlights what's been added, what's popular, etc. Great work everyone involved!

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11yr ago

CollX

Maker

@jkent2910 Absolutely! A lot of the things you mentioned are on our roadmap, especially powerful search and discovery tools, as well as robust notifications to let you know when people are leaving comments or branching off of your projects. We're also working on being able to like projects, which will help us rank projects and branches better, and a special metric that we think is better for guides than views called "completes" - which is exactly what it sounds like. We're developing an algorithm that figures out how many people actually finished your project. This all really comes back to why Squareknot exists - to make it easier to do things! And if you know other people actually did it, maybe you're more likely to do it too. Also, the accuracy of the recommendation engine we can build with all this data is off the charts. I'm really looking forward to that day. All in good time!

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11yr ago

CollX

Maker

Hey, everyone! Founder here. We made Squareknot to make it easier for everyone to do new things. Squareknot works almost like GitHub for stuff you can do - guides branch off of each other and off and off and off forever. It's super crazy fun. Other decent analogies include flow charts and choose-your-own-adventure books. We've also spent an insane amount of time on the design and implementation of our guides. We felt like we could use software to actually help people do things that they couldn't do before - so we made sure Squareknot was free of distracting elements. Clear rows keep you focused on the step you're doing. Cool little implementation detail: Squareknot only shows you branches for one step at a time, limiting choice overload. Happy to answer any questions you've got about Squareknot. Fire away!

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11yr ago

TRDATA

I'd like to test a tool, but always get an error while trying to add a new project (tried couple of times)

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11yr ago

CollX

Maker

@ekaterinaklink should be fixed now! Let me know if it still persists and we'll hit it with more hammers.

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11yr ago

Well designed and I like the layout/flow. Also, great domain name. As an Eagle Scout I think I appreciate it more than most. 1. Curious why you chose this domain for the project. 2. Would love to see a search added to the site. I feel like this could easily be the low friction way to snag a ton of "i need to figure out how to do x" from YouTube searches. To the later point, I love learning from YouTube but I'm not personally ready to teach by video. To me, this feels like an elegant way to accomplish it.

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11yr ago

CollX

Maker

@noinput here we go! 1. There's a really long story here, but I'll save that for later. Square knots have almost nothing to do with the service, but they are simple, and everyone already knows how to tie them (even if they don't know what they're called). They're also very strong. In making Squareknot, our goal was to make doing anything this simple - as if you already knew how to do it and just didn't know what it was called. Plus, we're pretty literally tying guides together with branching. In fact, in early prototypes of the service, we used to call branches "tie-ins". Luckily, saner minds prevailed on that one. 2. Search is a huge priority for us. We're hard at work on both guide search and people search! You'll see it appear soon enough. Keep an eye on our Twitter (@Squareknot) and/or blog thingie (http://blog.squareknot.com) and you'll know when it's out!

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11yr ago

Simplecast

Home page has an error! Worth it though :D

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11yr ago

CollX

Maker

@ashocka18 turns out we're getting a ton of traffic! We have commenced server beefing.

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11yr ago

Squareknot

Maker

@goldenchaos @oelmekki Hi, Olivier! I'm Justin Folvarcik, and I'm in charge of Squareknot's devops. "Beefing" is probably the wrong word choice for what we did today, haha. It was more akin to "fine tuning" our existing setup. Our database runs on 1.75GB of RAM with no problems! In fact, it's often not so much that you're running out of RAM, but rather that you're not allocating enough in the first place. Sorry I can't get more descriptive than that. :( But good luck with your product! Maybe you'll be the next one to hit the front page ;)

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11yr ago

CollX

Maker

@jfolvarcik @oelmekki in my defense, I might've called it "beefing" because I really, really wanted Chipotle. (Happy ending to the story: I got Chipotle)

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11yr ago

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