Best way to share (make accessible) to the world a maybe useful self-written utility script/program?

Question

Throughout my life I've accumulated a fair share of scripts that have proven to be useful to me in many cases and might be useful to many others. I look at things like todo.txt (which probably started off as just someone's personal text file manager) and even simpler ones online and sometimes I feel like I want to put my stuff out there for people who are looking for it to be able to use, open source.

What's the best way to just put things out there where people who might want to find it would find it? Should I start a well-read blog? post in forums? I don't want to advertise or spam it, just have it in some kind of way where anyone who would might be looking for something of similar functionality would find it through google or something.

Answer 1

I feel like I see a fair number of people come by Stack Overflow to promote a tool they've made. I think it's more in-tune with the Stack Overflow "vibe" if the tool is open source and the code is freely available on a popular host such as GitHub, Bitbucket, or Google Code rather than a paid product.

You definitely have to be careful if you choose this route -- blatant spamming will most likely get you banned, but if you provide careful, helpful answers on how to use your software to solve that person's specific problem, you add value to Stack Overflow while still promoting your work.

If the code you want to share isn't a fully cohesive toolset, you might want to just save the individual scripts as gists on GitHub rather than having a single repository with a variety of unrelated scripts in it so that it's easier to share a single script at a time.

Answer 2

I have found github to be really useful as a place to open-source my code. If you aren't familiar with github, it's a relatively secure backup-and-hosting system for git repositories of whatever you like. There's also Gitorious, and Bitbucket, which also supports Mercurial. Nevertheless, github seems to be winning mindshare.

Making the world aware of code is a lot trickier. I think you could put your scripts into your online repository host of choice, and then link answers on stackoverflow to code samples in your repositories related to the question answered. You could also edit some of your older but high-profile answers with links to examples online.

After that, a blog or other website that references your codebase, cross-linked with your new answers in technical StackExchange sites, seems like a good place to start being a higher hit in google searches.