Since my conversion I’ve effectively stopped using Syndigator but since this project is still close to my heart (and because I’m a friend of the developers - this helps a lot, of course) I keep a close watch on what’s going on with it and even do some of the boring tasks related to new releases (like dealing with the freshmeat page) out of the kindness of my heart… :)
Syndigator is about to have a new release which will mark the port to Gtk2 and I went around to it’s project page on SourceForge and, while I was at it, took a look at the statistics page.
Now this project is totally and completely based on it’s authors’ free time and is, in fact, a hobby of theirs. So are a lot of other open-source projects. But in this case there has been close to no effort spent in publicising it to the world at large.
There have been some initial posts on some weblogs, there is the mandatory Freshmeat page and some word-of-mouth was used, but other than that (and after the initial surge) things have mostly been very quiet on the “trumpet blowing” front.
So why all this now? Because what I saw on the numbers is quite intriguing (for me at least) and bodes very well indeed for the whole venture.
The project is close to one year old and apart from the total redesign of it’s web page (kindly maintained by a most welcome volunteer) there haven’t been any major changes to it and still we are steadily above the 6.000 pageviews/month and have been above the 10.000 mark since December 2003.
Now this may not seem to be very relevant but when I look at the number of downloads per month I see that we are above 400 a month since January 2004 and steadily rising. On the last days we have been well over 10 downloads a day. Now remember, nothing new has happened in terms of releases for quite some time now and absolutely no effort has been made from any of us in order to make Syndigator more widely known.
This leads me to the conclusion that the software is indeed:
a) good software
b) useful
c) better than the alternatives
Don’t get me wrong, I know these figures are puny on an all-time great-opensource-software scale, but for such a modest project to fair this well is something very enjoyable to watch indeed.
Kudos to Bruno and Paulo (who has to get a page on the web for pity’s sake!) ;) for a good job!