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While a lot of this may seem obvious to people who have promoted multiple projects, I think having all of the advice laid out in a simple guide is very helpful.

by jwoah12 13y ago

While a lot of this may seem obvious to people who have promoted multiple projects, I think having all of the advice laid out in a simple guide is very helpful. I recently released my first open source side project [1], and realized I didn't really know what to do to promote it beyond trying to get some exposure on HN (which failed). I'm going to try some of this advice this week, starting with picking a better name! [1]: http://jarwol.com/aTable/ http://jarwol.com/aTable/

wyuenho 13y ago
Agreed, and also failed to promote my project a few times on HN. In January I've decided to take a different route and promote on /r/javascript instead and all of a sudden it got bumped to number 1. Got picked up by tbranyen and eventually jashkenas. Oh, BTW, my Backbone-based grid clocks in only 6.2K minified and gzipped :) Much better documentation too. No column resizing and reordering at the moment, but working on it for the next version :P http://backgridjs.com/ http://backgridjs.com/
- jwoah12 13y ago
  That's good advice. I'll probably give Reddit a shot at some point. I am pretty jealous of your API docs for backgrid. What do you use to generate that? Also, my 17kb quote is minifed but not gzipped. ATable comes out to 5.1kb gzipped. That being said, 6.2kb is pretty damn impressive considering some of the extra functionality that backgrid has.
  - wyuenho 13y ago
    Ah thanks for clarifying. I couldn't find a minified version of aTable on your Github repo so I couldn't double check. A number of people have asked me what I used to generate the documentation. The truth is I didn't use any. I just hand-coded the whole HTML doc in Emacs using zencoding-mode. Styled it with bootstrap. The header serif font is a Mac font called Hoefler Text. The code editor is codemirror. That's it. The reason I do this is because I find pretty much all the documentation generators out there very lacking in layout controls. I could use Sphinx but I'll have to end up customizing the hell out of the default themes anyway. Might as well do it the basic way. The API docs however is generated using JSDuck.
    - jwoah12 13y ago
      Totally agree about the existing doc generators. Btw- I didn't start creating aTable because of a perceived shortcoming of Backgrid. If Backgrid existed a month or so earlier, I probably would have just tried to contibute. By the time I knew about Backgrid, though, I already had a mostly-working codebase and didn't want to throw it away.
  - bink-lynch 13y ago
    API docs for backgrid are fantastic. Looks like the docs are generated using JSDuck: https://github.com/senchalabs/jsduck https://github.com/senchalabs/jsduck.

by jwoah12 13y ago

wyuenho 13y ago

Agreed, and also failed to promote my project a few times on HN. In January I've decided to take a different route and promote on /r/javascript instead and all of a sudden it got bumped to number 1. Got picked up by tbranyen and eventually jashkenas. Oh, BTW, my Backbone-based grid clocks in only 6.2K minified and gzipped :) Much better documentation too. No column resizing and reordering at the moment, but working on it for the next version :P http://backgridjs.com/ http://backgridjs.com/

jwoah12 13y ago
That's good advice. I'll probably give Reddit a shot at some point. I am pretty jealous of your API docs for backgrid. What do you use to generate that? Also, my 17kb quote is minifed but not gzipped. ATable comes out to 5.1kb gzipped. That being said, 6.2kb is pretty damn impressive considering some of the extra functionality that backgrid has.
- wyuenho 13y ago
  Ah thanks for clarifying. I couldn't find a minified version of aTable on your Github repo so I couldn't double check. A number of people have asked me what I used to generate the documentation. The truth is I didn't use any. I just hand-coded the whole HTML doc in Emacs using zencoding-mode. Styled it with bootstrap. The header serif font is a Mac font called Hoefler Text. The code editor is codemirror. That's it. The reason I do this is because I find pretty much all the documentation generators out there very lacking in layout controls. I could use Sphinx but I'll have to end up customizing the hell out of the default themes anyway. Might as well do it the basic way. The API docs however is generated using JSDuck.
  - jwoah12 13y ago
    Totally agree about the existing doc generators. Btw- I didn't start creating aTable because of a perceived shortcoming of Backgrid. If Backgrid existed a month or so earlier, I probably would have just tried to contibute. By the time I knew about Backgrid, though, I already had a mostly-working codebase and didn't want to throw it away.
- bink-lynch 13y ago
  API docs for backgrid are fantastic. Looks like the docs are generated using JSDuck: https://github.com/senchalabs/jsduck https://github.com/senchalabs/jsduck.