Bitcoin Forum

Hi everyone,

I spent the last week or so putting this site together as an elance type site for projects that pay in bitcoin.  I tried to make the interface as simple and user friendly as possible and think I solved some problems that really annoy me with elance.  Would love to hear everyone's thoughts on how I can make it better.

http://www.btcworker.com (http://www.btcworker.com)

Great idea! Bitcoin needs a site like this. I'm looking at it currently.  Looks pretty good already,

My first comments:

• On the landing page you can probably leave out "If you have skills, this is likely a better way to get BTC than mining. If you have no skills, that sucks...". Too much aimed at the incrowd, in my opinion.
• Remove direct references to Elance on the landing page; if you need to mention competitors, just call them competitors, but not by name
• "4 skills, comma separated". It think it's too general and overwhelming. It'd be nicer if you had some kind of keyword/category selection interface here, a list to which you can add and can remove skills. I'd also not put it on the landing page, but so that someone can edit their profile in steps once they enter their account. When you make users think before signing up, you're missing potential signups :) Also, if you just want to post projects, you don't need to enter skills at all.
• Add HTTPS. Security, privacy and confidentiality are important for such a site.

I signed up, but there are no projects yet to look at and reply to, so I cannot comment on how that works yet.

All in all, looks promising, but there is still some work to do (but you probably knew that).

Thanks!  Yeah, definitely has a couple smallish bugs to iron out and needs a lot of work in fleshing out certain features (feedback system for ex.)  Re: comments, yeah, point taken re: landing page copy, I think I should be able to add https pretty easily.

Re: tags, yeah, I really need to think about how I want to do that.  My issue with e-lance is they limit you to certain categories and has weird organization.  Was thinking a tagging system of some kind would be easiest way to classify projects, and thought this could extend to users as well where they will have to tag themselves with certain skills and they can actually give their background/message when they make a bid on a project.  Need to think this over, but certainly open to suggestions?

Re: lack of projects, definitely a problem at this point, if some people sign up I will try to find some jobs and subcontract them to at least get some stuff up.  Also need to consider proper way to notify people of stuff.  Best to just publish new jobs as rss feed?  weekly e-mails?

Yeah, definitely needs a lot of work, but I think it could be a really good way for a lot of people to make a living online and give a boost to the bitcoin economy.  Thanks for checking it out.

Damn, I was making one of these too :(
Oh well, I'll slow development down a bit then...

Can I ask what your setup is like? Rails? MySQL?

Yeah, I figured I might not be the only guy working on something like this, I think competition in all kinds of different "X for bitcoin" sites is going to heat up as more people hear about bitcoin and start using it... should be interesting/good for people to have a couple different options.

On setup, I used Django/Python to build the site, Postgres db, hosted on AWS so I can scale the system up pretty quickly if lots of people start using it, and a bit of jquery here and there.  Yeah, it's truly amazing how rails, django, et all have drastically reduced the time it takes to build and expand a site and yet seems like a lot of people are still building w/ PHP or trying to build auth systems from scratch.  You're a rails guy yourself?

Yeah. I'm a rails guy. Switched from PHP awhile ago and I've never looked back. As a friend of mine said "The only thing PHP has over rails is more hosts support it". Which is true but if you're running a real site chances are you're not on shared hosting.

As for my setup, I was considering Linode as the host with an nginx+passenger. That said, I've never really given AWS a chance - can't say I have a valid reason either. It all seems pretty sweet.


Good luck :)

This is a great concept, i'm about to launch something in a similar vein, not like elance though.

wonderbread: Yeah, you should check out AWS, it's really cool.  I think other cloud infrastructure AWS competitors are going to have a difficult time because AWS really does provide a pretty reliable service at a good price with great APIs and a growing community around it.  It also really lends itself to amazon's model of selling tons of low margin stuff at scale by automating everything, something that a startup really can't compete with.

darbsllim: Thanks!  What's your twist?  I also thought a 99 Designs type site could be a great fit for bitcoin, looks like there's already a couple along the lines of auctions or craigslist, but still not a whole lot of activity on any of them.