I think this is certainly one of the most important areas for us to be focusing on... now that the codebase itself really is usable for the average person, it is time to be attracting some of those "average people."
While I think screencasts and product walkthroughs are all well and good, we should also be doing more "outside" promotion. Without sites linking us up, even our dev blog posts won't get much attention. For the time being, I think the fastest and most efficient way for us to get some positive promotion is to get some serious adoption amongst high profile blogs–especially ones run by less technical users. Part of this will involve us contacting them, inviting them to try out Habari, and probably even doing any theme conversion which is needed. In exchange, we would be able to get some serious endorsements–when people see high profile blogs using Habari, they'll be more likely to try it out for themselves. Another component of this is certainly to highlight the power and flexibility of Habari. We have a lot of power built in, so I think some technical screencasts would certainly be useful. Part of this could certainly be generalizing/tutorials about best practices which Habari has implemented. If it is advice which other people can see and apply to their own programming, that will accelerate the popularity. Finally, we should be prominently touting the external services we support. We have a Fire Eagle plugin, there should be a post about it on the Fire Eagle blog (http://feblog.yahoo.net/). We have superb Flickr support, I'd like to see Flickr mention us. We have support for a variety of anti-spam services, let's see blogs about that. When people are shopping around for a blog platform, integration with the services they already use is critical: this is one of the areas where Habari truly shines. I've also been thinking about how we can build some "wow" buzz. A lot of the amazing things about Habari aren't things that really get spread (when was the last time you saw a blog where someone was wowed by security?). I'm working on a couple of plugins/features which should help to do this, but I think we could certainly do more to talk about Habari really truly is amazing. Doing a screencast of Monolith certainly is part of that. In short, I suggest a couple of prongs of attack: 1) Walkthroughs and product feature highlights 2) "Celebrity" endorsements 3) Technical best practices 4) External service promotion 5) "Wow" features On Aug 29, 12:20 pm, "Michael Heilemann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've been wondering the same myself. And I think it also has a lot to do > with those of us actually running Habari not pimping it enough. So I > actually sat down earlier today (despite being sick, mind you) and recorded > a walkthrough of the Monolith admin, which I'll put up on my site tomorrow. > Maybe those more technically inclined amongst us could write entries on the > things Habari does better than other engines, under the hood. Sounds great! I look forward to watching it. > > The dev blog itself is largely dead in the water as it is. Not that a direct > comparison can be made, but 37 Signals and Coudal are two examples of really > good company and product-minded blogs, which have lots of personality as > well as highlighting even the smallest thing of their products. Agreed, especially re: 37 signals. I reference it all the time, and I have absolutely no involvement with their products. > > Also, it might be an idea if we were to do sneak-peak looks at upcoming > features on the dev blog, as we go. This way people have an idea of what's > coming, and will be reminded again and again that Habari is alive. Great idea! When we push something cool to trunk, I think we should write up a post about it, including screenshots/screencasts. > It could also be interesting to set up demo installs for 'prominent' > bloggers as well as some of our friends and personal favorites, with > complete data sets for them to play around with the admin and what not. I think we should also do more to direct people at our demo installation. If people remember, I also built a tour and packaged it as a plugin, so if we could get that in somewhere as well I bet that'd help. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/habari-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
