Promoting the project and gaining attention

[SuperKogito]

The article @vsoch wrote on her blog along with her tweet should help spread the world about the urlstechie tools. This issue is a place to brainstorm and collect suggestions and ideas on how to gain more attention for the project. We should also discuss pacing and maybe construct a tilmeline for the actions we will take, cuz too much posting can be spamming and that way the actions we take will backfire :/

Here is my list of things I intend to do the up-coming days that I hope to help us get more attention:

• Post about the tools in various programming groups on Facebook. (This usually gets me some views).
• Post about it on Reddit (I am new to this, it seems okay but nothing major).
• Write a post about it on my Blog / or maybe better on Medium (never done it before but might help).
• Post about it on Hacker rank and other forums.
• Post about urlstechie on my LinkedIn (never tried this before but should help).

I partially tried the previous steps with other projects I have. In all fairness, they did help boost some projects a little but nothing major with the exception of submitting a paper to JOSS. That seemed to be the most successful action, I did. However, for our tools, I don't think a research paper is an option.

As you can see, there is little experience here about promoting the tools. So any suggestions are welcome. The tool is very useful thanks to the additions of @vsoch and it should be able to prove itself, that imo is the best promotion eventually cuz a good tool is reliable. So the aim here is not do advertisement but rather give the tool a little push so we can take this project to the next level ;)

[vsoch]

heyo! Okay so I've given some more thought about next steps for moving forward. First, I think it would make sense to publish the GitHub action in it's refactored state (meaning that you do your usual testing, release) and then I can also update repos where I use it to ensure that it's still working properly. It would be terrible to make a fuss about the action and then have bugs lurking :)

We should also discuss pacing and maybe construct a tilmeline for the actions we will take, cuz too much posting can be spamming and that way the actions we take will backfire :/

Totally agree with you here! Slow and steady, the turtle way, we'll at least not fall under a tree and forget about our goals entirely :)

I think all of the avenues that you proposed for sharing make sense, but I would suggest that instead of saying "hey look how useful this is!" we first focus on directed support / implementation for the plugin into a few likely use cases, namely:

• different flavors of static deploy of different sites on GitHub pages
• different kinds of code bases that have links around

How do we choose these projects? We could look for communities that we participate in, or look at html-proofer and see if there are users posting about the retry issue (and then suggest or even just open a PR with the suggested fix).

What we want to do is show actual utility that we can then share and talk about. Then all the sharing on the various places you mentioned makes a lot of sense. Also in doing this we will likely stumble on bugs / other features that are needed / wanted, etc.

JoSS - ug. I've had some luck on JoSS in the past with some of my software, but recently I have been rejected several times for (what I think is most definitely research software) because someone on their editorial board disagrees. Their main criteria is "would someone in research cite it" and I think for urlchecker, even though it could eventually be a widely used integration, the answer is strongly no. I too don't see an obvious way to put this into a research context, because it's just a linter.

But here is an idea - what about some kind of fun project where we involve the research community, but do our own small analysis, and then that serves as a writeup that we can share on social media and encourage folks to use it? What I'd want to do is assemble a list of documentation served on repositories that are research oriented / groups, and then programmatically run the checker for all of them to calculate the number of total links, number of broken, etc. Actually, if we add the ability to specify an output file, we could even put the entire results into a data repository, include the scripts for running, and heck, if we can make an argument for a research tool for documentation (that has shown purpose and we have some hypothesis / conclusions about links) we might even have enough to at least submit a paper to JoSS (and then to ArXiv if it's rejected). What do you think? So my thinking for moving forward:

• I think you should test and re-release the GitHub action
• When you do that, I can update on my repos to test the new version
• I can implement the ability to specify writing results to an output file for urlchecker-python
• Then we can make a list of repos that we want to run it for (that we would eventually want to suggest / PR to add the check)
• Once we have that, then I'll start our little data analysis to check repos! Would we want to do something that not only runs across repos, but also across time? Would it be interesting to set up as a CI automated job that can collect metrics over a longer period of time?
• we we can write it up, perhaps submit first or just share it
• and then to all repos we test, we can offer to help fix the broken links by way of a PR to use the action.

This sounds like fun! I'm totally willing to take on the bulk of work stated above, I haven't done a little fun project like this in a while. Let me know your thoughts!

[SuperKogito]

So I have been trying to boost the urlstechie online presence. So far nothing spectacular but I wrote a small blog about it, inspired by yours. Made a LinkedIn page for it and posted about it on reddit.

• https://superkogito.github.io/blog/urlstechie.html
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/urlstechie/?viewAsMember=true
• https://www.reddit.com/r/githubprojects/comments/fynx6b/urlstechie_join_us_in_building_url_testing_tools/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/coolgithubprojects/comments/fyo744/httpsgithubcomurlstechieurlcheckerpython_is_an/

Concerning the Linkedin page, I wanted to post some our blogs on there so would it be okay for you if I do that and if I can mention you by name? I have to ask to avoid any misunderstandings.

[vsoch]

I think we need to finish fixing bugs in the current library before sharing like this, and then do the little project we talked about. Why and when did you change the plan we discussed?

Please don’t mention me by name, @vsoch is fine. :)

[maelle]

Speaking of promotion PRs, would it make sense to PR into existing uses to update the action?

[SuperKogito]

Well I kinda got side-tracked there, as usual. I would rather take @vsoch approach here, because we got one shot (Eminem reference, I couldn't resist) to get this project a nice amount of attention. PRs to update the action version seems okay imo, after all whether they are merged or not, that's for the repo owners.