Why announcements are important

TL;DR Announcements deserve their fair share of space and attention. ElixirWeekly is a thing now.

For some of us, myself often in included, marketing our open source stuff to the masses is a dreadful endeavor especially if there are no distinct venues to do so.

If I go to Twitter and tweet something akin to “InchEx v0.7.0 released” on the same day when Rails 6.0 is released, then I am simply out of luck. Hell, if I go to Twitter to promote something it does not even have to be release-day for some community darling project, it is totally enough if it is just a busy day - people won’t notice my announcement when there is a stream of other stuff going on.

ElixirStatus was created to solve this very problem. The idea was always to give everyone the same voice and the same share of space. If you want to promote a blog post or get feedback for your new library, everybody has the same chance of getting noticed.

This community is one year old now and in my mind it is on its way to fulfil this promise. The Twitter account has over 2,000 followers. In June alone, 60 announcements were shared via ElixirStatus, which in turn gathered 5,500 clicks on the posted links.

If you create something around Elixir and want people to notice it, nobody can gurantee success or even attention. But with ElixirStatus you get a fair shot and the chance for your blog or code to stand on its own.

Starting this month, there will be another outlet for the things posted to ElixirStatus: ElixirWeekly. It is a weekly round-up of all the things posted to the site and on the web. If you like the idea of ElixirStatus but do not want to follow “live”, then ElixirWeekly is a great new way to subscribe to the newest development in the Elixir community.