How Not to Announce Product Releases
I watch a couple of blog aggregaters for the ColdFusion community, and one thing I notice a lot is blog entries that announce product changes and/or releases. But one thing that is usually missing is a good product description.
I think most of us that maintain software projects assume that people know who we are, and what our products are. But that's not always the case. Please take the time to give a quick intro to our product, every time you talk about it on your blog. Or at least post a link to a FAQ page, or something similar.
Here's a bad product announcement:
CFQuickDocs 1.2
I've updated CFQuickDocs. It has lots of cool new features, so check it out soon!
Here's a good one:
New CFQuickDocs Release
I've just released version 1.2 of CFQuickDocs, my tool for quick ColdFusion CF tag/function lookups. This release adds 4 new features, which are...
If I were just learning about CFQuickDocs from these product announcements, the first one would leave me wondering what's going, and if I'm in a hurry, I'd probably not even check it out. However, the second one gives the reader a quick description, and then they are more likely to try it out.
Anyway, these are my opinions on the subject, if you disagree let us know in the comments.
Jake Munson
38 Yrs old
The only counter point I'd say would be that the majority of the people interested in minor releases/updates are already knowledgeable about the product, so maybe just a link to a project page or FAQ would suffice. For major releases it probably makes more sense to be more detailed.
All of this speaks to the beauty of RIAForge though - because a well laid out project page over there can solve all of these issues.
I'll also say that a lot of project pages have this failing as well. Particularly in the open source world, people tend to make their project pages just that, a place for the project developers and community to do stuff. But this leaves new people out in the cold, as they often leave introductions off the site, or bury them in hard to find places. mozilla.org used to be this way, but now it's a LOT better.
Take novels as an example. Most good authors that write series of books, like a trilogy, will review major facts from previous books in each book. Is this annoying for the person that is reading the book back to back? Yes, but it's more annoying for the person that had to wait a couple of years between books, and forgot a lot of stuff, if they don't know what's going on.
You have to weigh the pros and cons. In my opinion, the minor inconvenience for frequent readers is a much smaller problem than leaving the new readers in ignorance. I realize that you can just provide a link to a FAQ, which may be the best answer, but for folks like me that read blogs from an RSS reader, and prefer to just get the facts without having to follow a few links, I'll usually just go on to the next blog entry if there's not enough info. But it's probably just personal preference.
In any case, I like your advice, Jake. I'm going to try to follow it next time I blog about a release.
http://www.pbell.com/index.cfm/2007/1/3/How-much-a...
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2...
She takes the time to put 'web browser' and 'mail client' after Firefox and Thunderbird. Sure, possibly 99% of her readers will know what Firefox and Thunderbird are, but some won't. And I seriously doubt that those that do know what these products are will be annoyed by the short descriptions.