Blogging about it

In every project there are many different layers of users and levels of interest. On one hand, you have the core maintainers who work day in and day out on the code and who follow every little change and development that then know exactly what is going on. In the other end of the spectrum you have the occasional infrequent users who cannot quite recall the name of your project and mostly just use it when following a how-to guide post somewhere.

Getting information out to all the different kinds of users about what is going on in the project is difficult. I have found that doing regular blog posts about user facing changes help me get the word out to people who are not always the ones most tightly connected or associated with the project.

• This is what are working on.
• This feature will show up in the next release.
• Look at this cool thing you can do with our project.
• Remember this gem from the past.

This kind of information feed works as an addition and extension of having proper and detailed technical documentation. It cannot replace it.