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Ifolder Server Review
liquidat writes "I wanted to have a look at the new Open Source ifolder-server and additionally at ifolder in general. ifolder is mainly supported by Novell, and Novell advertises it's Suse Linux, so I downloaded a Suse-VMware image, installed the vmware player and gave it a try. After I installed the needed software it worked pretty well and gave me a quite good impression of what ifolder is about."
OK, not completely, but it's way behind where it could be, and a great deal of that is the kind of mentality that both publishes and publicizes articles like this one.
/. to tell the worls what your cool project does. DO NOT depend on word of mouth. DO NOT depend on google or usenet or anything else. Put the stupid desccription right up front.
First off, the article doesn't tell you what the heck ifolder is. 99% of those who could use knowledge about ifolder won't read the article because after 1 or 2 paragraphs, they still have no clue what it is. Most would still have to guess after reading the whole thing.
But worse, while the article does point to the ifolder pages, the main page there doesn't tell you anything useful. Either include a short description or make the big, unmissable link a "What it is" button.
DO NOT depend on
Yes, there are a lot of big bucks product pages that are just as brain-edad. If they have the market share, or ar ethe only game in town, they'll survive. But they'd do even better if they followed this rule.
But for most of you, your open source project is NOT the 500 pound gorilla. It's not even the 1 ounce mouse baby, even if it could be the 500 pound gorilla. Why make life more difficyult for the end user? That is NOT the way to market share. Open, closed, free, expensive, doesn't matter. Tell people what the heck it is they can get, even if it's free.