Just wondering what methods people have found success with for generating interest/traffice (read: usage) in their free and/or open-source projects/tools/etc? It seems like simply contributing to an existing, relatively popular project can be a little tough sometimes, as far as getting people to review/read and merge your patches, etc... it's often that much harder to generate any usage of a brand new project, and nothing is more de-motivating that writing something 'for the community', and then have no one use it... thoughts/suggestions/pointers/etc?
(shameless self-promotion: the current project I'm talking about is http://github.com/sandbender/antistink ... it's intentionally left as-is in a Minimum Viable Product/Alpha state, not because I don't want to spend time polishing it, but would rather spend that time on other stuff if no one is going to use it except myself anyways :s )
1) Create a web page which promotes your product. Heresy: don't put it on Github. It should have attractive, professional design, market your software effectively, and have a clear call to action. Think "what would 37Signals do", and copy liberally.
http://rubyonrails.org/
2) Get a unique visual identity for the project. Same reasoning as #1. Humans are visual creatures, and projects with e.g. logos that do not look like they were made in MS Paint by a drunk chimpanzee communicate professionalism, safety, popularity, ongoing maintenance, etc.
See http://www.abingo.org (disclaimer: my site) for my take on doing this for an OSS Rails project. Points of note: professional logo, selling the product through benefits, 1-minute install guide, live demo, copious documentation, video, etc.
3) If you build it, that means absolutely nothing about them coming or not. "Make it so good they can't ignore you" is horsepuckey which engineers treat as a magic talisman to ward off evil marketing demons. If you want it used, you are going to have to talk to people and tell them to use it.
4) "Make something people want." Does it solve a problem which is preventing businesses from making money, in a fashion much better than currently existing alternatives? If not, it probably isn't going anywhere, since OSS adoption among end users is close to zero outside of a few headline projects.