Publicity needed: was Re: Is erlang too small?

Wed May 12 12:44:39 CEST 2004

On 11 May 2004, Jeffrey M. Einhorn wrote:

> In summation as an Erlang developer I would like to see its user base
> continue to grow and I feel including additional libraries would help
> that cause by making current developers more effective and increasing
> the features that might convince new developers to give the language a
> try.
> 	Thanks for Erlang/OTP,
> 		-jeff einhorn

  Well I guess all of us in this list agree about that.

  IMHO - To get the user base  to grow we need to publicize what we've
got and not necessarily write new applications.

  What I think we're lacking now is good flashy documentation.

  Example: I talked to Klacke last Sunday - we were out doing a high speed
two-wheeled bikers survey of the leafy lanes near Stockholm (Erlang Bikers rule :-) - I said 

  "what yaws needs is lots of flashy examples"

He said (paraphrased)

  "yup, not only Yaws - Tobbe  has node a great samba release, it's in
jugerl, it beats the socks off anything else"

  We need to publicize this stuff. This means lots of nice pretty web
pages - that get googled.

  Now how do we get high up in the google hit list?

  - I know the answer to this one.

	1) Your HTML should be validated
	   spiders give up on unparsable data

	2) the meta data in you page header is very important
	   for indexing purposes

	   This is how I start my pages

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<head>
<title>Joe Armstrong SICS home page</title>
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html charset=ISO-8859-1'>
<meta name='Author' content='Joe Armstrong'>
<meta name='Description' content='Joe Armstrong SICS home page'>
<meta name='Keywords' content='joe, armstrong, sics, Erlang'>
<meta name='Language' content='English'>
<link rev='made' href='mailto:joe+remove_this_spam_stopper@REDACTED'>
<link rel='index' href='index.html'>
<link rel='STYLESHEET' type='text/css' href='base.css'>
</head>

  This layout increase the probability that you get indexed

  After that  words in <h1>...</h1> etc get  indexed then <h2>...</h2>
etc.

  Then Google assigns high weights to sites that are referenced a lot.

  ---- so here's what I propose ---

  1) All of us who have place for a web server start a web server
     on the machine or machines they have access to

  2) We all choose the *same* template

	I highly recommend

	"Blue Haze"

	see http://www.sics.se/~joe/erlang/

	The Home link should point to the same page

    The reason for using the same template is so that people will think
we have made a gigantic web site.

   3) We cross link each other - to increase our google ratings

   4) We write out mete data properly etc again to up the index
      hits

  I made a start here

	see http://www.sics.se/~joe/erlang/

  So let's do an experiment:

	Each of you who has some project to report on

	make you own web server - base it on  http://www.sics.se/~joe/erlang/
and send me the link

   I'll edit these into my web page and we'll see how it goes

   Comments?

   Cheers

	/Joe