Looking to get the word out to users

September 28, 2006 12:29 AM

I've just gotten an open source project off the ground and am wondering about respectable ways to get the word out.

I've gone and designed a low-fat markup language and written a parser and a couple of tools for it. This language is designed to be an extremely concise yet very readable way of representing heirarchies of data, and I beleive it will be useful in a variety of situations described on the project home page, however I'm wary of trying to raise awareness because I don't want to come across as cheezy. Basically I want to initially just find a small number of other people who might be interested at poking at this idea and the initial source code I've written and refining it and making it really ready to be used out there in the world. I don't want to just go and digg the home page of it, or do a metafilter writeup of my own creation, it would lack integrity. Ideas?

posted by ephemerae to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Are you aware of "Metafilter Projects"?
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 12:40 AM on September 28, 2006

@Steven, no, I was not aware! Thank you. I have an entry for the project there. I think that's a good start.
posted by ephemerae at 12:53 AM on September 28, 2006

One place I still regularly visit for cool open source projects is Freshmeat. Have you tried that yet?
posted by lodev at 12:56 AM on September 28, 2006

Move one question up.
posted by bh at 3:17 AM on September 28, 2006

Reminds me of Rivest's (of RSA fame) S-Expressions.
posted by blenderfish at 3:20 AM on September 28, 2006

Usenet is where many of the people who are really, really interested in amazingly small-niche software live. I'm not sure exactly which newsgroup you'd want, but spend some time searching on Google Groups (before you get a proper newsreader to actually post) and you may find a surprisingly active group devoted to exactly what your software does.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 5:51 AM on September 28, 2006

Thanks for the suggestions so far folks. A project page on freshmeat.net is now up, and a SourceForge.net page is pending approval. A few brave souls have downloaded the source already!
posted by ephemerae at 7:54 AM on September 28, 2006

When you're ready for a little more attention, drop an email to Linux.com (editors at ostg.com) and other sites that cover open source. It might be worth an article.
posted by jzb at 8:06 AM on September 28, 2006

Make some bookmarks with relevant on del.icio.us and, of course, reddit.
posted by Good Brain at 9:26 AM on September 28, 2006

[I unlinked your project page here. asking about promotion is fine, promotion is not what askme is for. projects seems like it will be fine. put a link in your profile if you'd like]
posted by jessamyn at 7:57 AM on September 29, 2006