Announce to Freshmeat. Besides being widely read itself, this group is a major feeder for Web-based technical news channels.

Never assume the audience has been reading your release announcements since the beginning of time. Always include at least a one-line description of what the software does. Bad example: “Announcing the latest release of FooEditor, now with themes and ten times faster”. Good example: “Announcing the latest release of FooEditor, the scriptable editor for touch-typists, now with themes and ten times faster”.

Refer to the website examples in Chapter16 for examples of what a well-educated project website looks like.

An easy way to have a website is to put your project on one of the sites that specializes in providing free hosting. In 2003 the two most important of these are SourceForge (which is a demonstration and test site for proprietary collaboration tools) or Savannah (which hosts open-source projects as an ideological statement).

If you are running a project named ‘foo’, your developer list might be <foo-dev> or <foo-friends>; your announcement list might be <foo-announce>.

An important decision is just how private the “private” development list is. Wider participation in design discussions is often a good thing, but if the list is relatively open, sooner or later you will get people asking new-user questions on it. Opinions vary on how best to solve this problem. Just having the documentation tell the new users not to ask elementary questions on the development list is not a solution; such a request must be enforced somehow.

An announcements list needs to be tightly controlled. Traffic should be at most a few messages a month; the whole purpose of such a list is to accommodate people who want to know when something important happens, but don't want to hear about day-to-day details. Most such people will quickly unsubscribe if the list starts generating significant clutter in their mailboxes.

See the section Where Should I Look? in Chapter16 for specifics on the major open-source archive sites. You should release your package to these.

Other important locations include: