Save time on connecting fonts. One year later

Hello!
Exactly one year ago, on July 12, a post was published about the idea to collect free fonts and organize convenient access to them. This date will be considered the birthday of the current WebFont.ru .
Today there will be a narration about what and how we managed to do.

Statistics

Over the past month:
- Our site was visited by about 6 thousand people;
- almost 2000 archives with fonts were downloaded from the site (download statistics from plug-ins are not counted);
- processed about 2 million font connections by third-party sites;

Our plugins for editors were installed 2800 times, and extensions for Opera Next and Chrome are just over 300 times.
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What is done

Plugins

Today we have plugins for Sublime Text 2 and Php Storm \ Web Storm. On the way, a plugin for NotePad ++. All plugins are available for installation directly from the editors. Read more about their work on the site .

Polygon

For more than half a year, our site has been operating. And most recently, he learned to save your work, on the principle of how to jsfiddle, codepen, etc.

Expansion

We thought that sometimes it’s hard to pick up the right font on a third-party site and decided the question radically. We made our site accessible to any site by creating an extension for browsers. While it works in the new Opera and Chrome. You can install the extension from the respective stores.

User registration

Most recently, we opened the registration of users on the site. It, first of all, is caused by the need to keep the work created at the test site with binding to the user. There will be more.

And this is all we multiplied by the speed of work. The search gives out options suddenly, saving the work for no longer than 2 seconds and without reloading the page, registration is as simple as possible.

What does it all work

The very first version of the site lived for a long time on a regular WordPress, but at the end of May we finished the main work on creating our own engine.

Everything revolves on a dedicated server running gunicorn + nginx. Templating is done using lodash.js, and the platform itself is django. Search our own, written in javascript. In general, we have a lot of javascript, so much that if you turn it off, the site will be impossible to use. Caching is configured using nginx + memcache.
Fonts to an external connection are distributed from the cloud in Selector, which allows us to distribute the load. Cheap and angry. Previously, they used S3 from Amazon, but it was much more expensive there + caching there only through CloudFront. As a result, we hold Amazon as a reserve.

Fonts

At the time of this writing, we have published 160 fonts in 380 styles, all are free and support Cyrillic.

Communications

First of all, we strive to make a convenient service for us, because it is foolish to create something without listening to colleagues. To do this, we have a negotiation site, a Vkontakte group and a Twitter account . There we post all the information related to innovations on our service, publish links to useful articles on typography and accept tips from users. Highly recommend to subscribe, so as not to miss anything critically important or very useful.

By the way, if you write or translate good articles about fonts, feel free to offer links to us, and we will publish them in our community. And if you do not write and translate, then someday we will begin to do it ourselves, although not our profile.

How are you better than Google Webfonts?

This question has become a duty everywhere. Nothing better. We have different tasks, although there are similarities in some points. We would like to note that we do not recommend connecting fonts from WebFont.ru to our sites and offer to download and store them locally. Imports to an external connection are used for demonstration purposes, so that you can see how it looks on the site without downloading the font. In addition, some fonts even have connection compatibility labels with Google Webfonts. Tried-up-connected-connected with GWF or downloaded yourself - this is how we see the use of the service. In turn, we have very convenient tools for downloading and the whole process of getting fonts is extremely simplified.

Total

Plans

So it turned out that they began to notice us in Habré, a large number of links appeared in personal blogs, on forums and in social. networks. In addition, having received a couple of efficient and inspiring comments from the co-founder of Smashingmagazine.com, we have become even stronger in our desire to make the most convenient and useful font service in the world. Work in this direction has not stopped at all for a year, and ideas have not dried up. For example, very soon we will have the first widget running on our api.

Thanks

As before, we express gratitude to all who are not indifferent to the project and supporting it with their advice. We listen to you, read everything you write to us and take into account. Thank you very much!

For a snack

It has become .

Thanks for attention.