Thursday May 03, 2007
Thursday May 03, 2007
Write A Tutorial About Your NetBeans Module And Get Big Hits On Your Site
I got an interesting Google Analytics picture from my colleague Petr Pisl yesterday. It shows statistics pertaining to our nbwicketsupport project:
What is interesting is that the picture in the top left shows that there was a massive spike in hits on the nbwicketsupport site over the past week or so. How could this be? What were the reasons? Why the sudden surge in interest? No new release had come out, no one (as far as we're aware) had made a particular big deal about nbwicketsupport recently, so what was going on?
Then we figured it out. On the front page of http://www.netbeans.org/, in the bottom right corner, is a section called "Making the Most of NetBeans". Over the past week or two, until yesterday or so, the Introduction to the Wicket Web Framework, which goes through the features of our nbwicketsupport project and shows you how to build a simple yet powerful Wicket application, had been mentioned there. Both Petr and I have received a lot of e-mails asking about nbwicketsupport and about where to get the related NBM file, directly as a result of the tutorial being mentioned on the front page of www.netbeans.org. We know this for a fact since there hasn't been this kind of attention in our project for quite some time.
Basically, this is conclusive proof, if you ever needed it, that the NetBeans Community Docs program is extremely valuable specifically to you, reading this blog entry, if you are a developer of NetBeans modules. The interest in your project will spike over the period that a tutorial on your project is referenced on the front page of http://www.netbeans.org. Have you written a tutorial on your NetBeans module (i.e., a plugin for NetBeans)? Has it been referenced on the front page of http://www.netbeans.org? If no, write a tutorial and follow the simple procedure on the NetBeans Community Docs page to get it published to the world. If you've already been through the process and want another bunch of big hits on your site, why not write another tutorial on the same plugin, but this time for more advanced users? Or contact James, the owner of the Community Docs program, who might refer to you in his blog, where he sometimes highlights community contributors to the program.
May 03 2007, 05:45:12 AM PDT Permalink
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