On 2007-04-28, torhus@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
[...]
I guess I'm asking in part because I'm not sure dallegro's home
page would be used much. But somewhere to link to outside of svn
is required. And a separate forum for support and feedback might
be useful.
Even if you are not going to use the web much, think of it like an
answering machine. In a few months something in your life may take away
the time you dedicate now to dallegro and you could find yourself unable
to even answer emails from people asking basic stuff.
A website is a point of reference to users of any kind of software which
can help other developers make an opinion about using or contributing to
your project without having to contact you first. My personal experience
with the Allegro web page is that my mail contact address is at the
bottom of each page but I'm contacted as few times as once or twice a
year. I think this is because most people just don't trust email any
more as they used in the good old days. Possibly they think it's spam
infested or no human is listening.
But web pages are something really important for 99% of the users which
won't even bother you sending obvious bug reports. Take a look at
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=5665&ugn=alleg&type=&mode=alltime,
which shows visitor statistics for the web since Allegro joined
SourceForge.
In September 2000 I think George Foot uploaded Shawn's Talula web page
manually to replace the blank 404 page at SF, and visits jumped up to
3000 a month. I believe it was a year later when I took the position
of webmaster, creating new sections and just giving it a more decent
look. It jumped to about 25000 visits a month.
Now, the funny thing is that in both jumps there was practically no
content change. The main important stuff, download information, FAQ,
contact information and such was the same. But just having something,
and later something prettier makes people stick around, it gives them
visibility about your project.
The spike in February 2005 reflects the way SourceForge changed measuring
web hits. All the other statistics continued in their line, unlike
the other spikes I mentioned which happened for downloads too. You can
ignore that.
Right now dallegro is probably only known to some of the .cc forums and
ocassional visitors of the main Allegro web page. Once you give it a
proper home you will see an increase of interests, especially in people
from the D community who are not very aware of Allegro being usable with
your bindings and possibly stuck with SDL bindings as their only choice
for graphic programming.
One advantage of using dsource is that it makes it more visible
to the D community.
That alone justifies the work behind maintaining a web page.
With respect to having a repo here or there, it doesn't matter. The nature
of the net makes it so that people don't even care. Many "respectful"
sites still link to Shawn's Talula mirror of the web page, even though
it only carries the English translation, has no binaries with all links
pointing to SF, and the documentation and everything else states SF
should be used as the main mirror.
Trac is very cool if you use it well. You should use it if you can,
which possibly means migrating your dallegro chunk of the repo. Ask the
svn guys if this is possible (moving a subdirectory to another repo as
the new root).