Ladislav Bodnar, the guy running distrowatch, thinks the 50002 ANNOUNCEMENT is terribly fucking boring. In fact, he thought it was so bad, he didn't even include blag's announcement on his site (for the first time). I asked why, and here was his response:
Ladislav wrote:
I looked at your release announcement in the forum and found it to be the same old, recycled and utterly boring announcement as always. Can't you produce something more exciting? Something that tells people what's new in the latest release and why they should download it? Something enthusiastic and enticing?
If you yourself are not prepared to make an effort to put together a half-decent release announcement, how can you expect others to do it?
Ladislav
Youch. He's pretty right though. I do just take the old one, swap in the names of the new updates, s/50001/50002, and push it out. I'm generally just glad the CD is done and working. I have never spent much time /at all/ trying to promote blag. (Promotion currently consists of an email to distrowatch, lwn.net, and a freshmeat update.)
Following up with him, he responded:
Ladislav wrote:
It doesn't need to be a flowery PR announcement (I dislike those too), just some information about each new release. One paragraph of useful information saying what exactly changed since the last release and why the changes would be great. Or maybe you can provide a full changelog of all updates (including version numbers), bug fixes, feature enhancements, etc.
In sum, we need less suck in the PR department. r7 has offered to write something up, but I think the issue is also a bit wider than just one ANNOUNCEMENT.
Should we actively start promoting blag like most distros do? If so, where? How? Perhaps even, why? :)
The website has had pretty much the same look for quite some time. Dylan did do a decent looking mockup of a new look, but it really wasn't /too/ much different. Should we revamp that as well? If so, who? :)
Oh, and mailing lists are on the way. Either autistici.org or aktivix.org is going to host them. (As a historical note, we had mailing lists until the servers were sent to the FBI then they didn't get set up again.)
In sum, BLAG marketing. /me runs ;)
-Jeff
P.S. Ladislav said it was fine if i posted this.