How can I give an open source project more exposure?

Question

I have recently published a project that I was working on to CodePlex, with the approval of my employer. This project was mostly done for the needs of the company, but I'm sure this thing can be of value to other programmers outside the company which was my primary motivation to publish it.

I'm reluctant to specify which project it is, to avoid the suspicion of this being a shameless plug and instead focus on the bigger question:

How can I lowly programmer such as myself give a pet project more exposure to the community at large, primarily to get more feedback not only in terms of bugs found but also in terms of direction that the project should/could take?

Answer 1

To be honest, I'm not sure what you can do other than tweet or blog about it. CodePlex itself has increasingly more visibility in the community, so if your project solves a genuine problem for many people, they will find it without your help. If it's niche, not so much.

Answer 2

If your project is useful and well programmed there should be no trouble getting exposure whatsoever. What you need to do is to make an announcement about the project on some community of potential users (on a discussion forum most likely) and if they like it, that's all you need to do. If people don't find it useful, there's not much to do other than annoy people by advertising it too much.

Answer 3

Here's what I've been doing for ReactiveXaml, though I'm just as clueless as you are - my two main goals are to make sure people know what it's good for, and make it easy for people to get started. To this end, here's what I've been doing:

• Make sure you have a sample application checked in that demonstrates how to use the project if it's a library.
• Blog. A lot. Blogging not only lets you talk about the project, it lets people see the design decisions behind your code, the 'why' as well as the 'what'.
• Set up a Google Alert for your project's name as well as any relevant keywords, so you can jump in and help folks out
• Make sure you have a mailing list and point folks to it
• It feels a little spammy, but for example any time anyone mentions Reactive Extensions and MVVM, if they might be interested I leave a comment with a link to the Github page.

Like I said, I'm totally new to this too, but I'm just starting to get some traction after months of nothing - keep in mind that most of these things are on an exponential curve, it'll feel like you're getting nowhere for a long time but if you've got a good idea, eventually it will pick up.

Answer 4

Link to it in your SO profile and scan SO occasionally for any questions that may be helped by your library directly as a solution or indirectly as a code reference and mention it in answers or comments. It hasn't worked for me yet but I'm still hopeful :)

• http://code.google.com/p/psilent-poker-engine/
• http://code.google.com/p/psilent-card-graphics4j/

Answer 5

As always, you need to market your project to those, who might be interested. As a first step, you need to identify your target audience. Second, you need to identify where your target audience is usually located (e.g. online boards, stackoverflow, conferences, etc.). Finally, you need to go there and make them aware of your project.

Besides this direct approach, you can also maintain a development blog and provide online documentation in the hope that a search engine will direct some users to you. Still, such an approach could take some time as search engines need some time to pick up completely new sites.

Finally, it is always a good idea to inform your friends and fellows about what you are doing. If it is not just a small project, but a larger code release, it might be in the interest of your employer to make a press release. But of course they won't do it for just a small lib. Still, they could add a link to your project on their corporate profile page saying that they give back to the community, etc.

Answer 6

Announce it via freshmeat and sourceforge, i.e. create a freshmeat page and a sourceforge project page.

Include nice 10 line summaries and provide easy accessible documentation, s.t. people can find it, if they search for it.

Answer 7

The way I see it done all over the internet is to present yourself and possibly your software as an "expert" in whatever field your software targets. Then leave "breadcrumbs" everywhere and anywhere you post or make comments in your signature.

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Or

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Here I am answering your question about The Most Awesomest Game Ever that I happened to write. You really should check it out.

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• Create a Blog and flog that as above.
• Read Guerrilla Marketing