Please help us promote this site... I know there are some ways in the sidebar. But can you come up with more interesting ways to promote this site?
The SE folks have a post on how to help spread a site: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/a-recipe-to-promote-your-site/
Now this site also has its own URL: https://askubuntu.com/
By the way, now the short links http://bit.ly/askubuntu and http://j.mp/askubuntu link to this site. So, you can use those to spread this site using twitter etc.
I've updated all my clients websites to spawn obtrusive javascript popup windows yelling at visitors who run Ubuntu with: "YOU NEED TO VISIT THIS SITE"
But in all seriousness those of the members here who are more social should bring the site up whenever appropriate. For instance at several monthly meetups I try to bring up this site to other Ubuntu users and other who are interested in taking the first step - word of mouth can be a powerful thing.
For those members who are more into (micro)blogging I've been blowing up my Twitter feed (when appropriate) about the site as a lot of followers of mine use Linux or Ubuntu in some faucet.
On forums I've added my "Flair" badge for this Ubuntu stackexchange to help attract other users to the site. This is especially helpful on technology forums (and the Ubuntu Forums) it's a more subtle way to promote this site without having potential backlash as "spamming".
--- Added some time later
In addition to bringing the site to your blogs, feeds, and forums - bring them to events: Bug-crushing session with your Ubuntu LoCo, At an event representing Ubuntu, anywhere people who use the OS and would listen to you.
Lastly when we move out of Beta and (hopefully) secure ask.ubuntu.com I think shirts (deep purple/white text or old school brown/white) with just the text ask.ubuntu.com would be just as effective.
The best way I can think of is to put a copy of StackImage Flair on your blog or in your signatures on forums.
What is StackImage?
It's a small image that stays up to date with your current reputation on this site:
Examples:
http://stackimage.quickmediasolutions.com/flair.php?id=5&site=askubuntu&background=eeeeee&border=ffffff&text=555555&title=5555ff&font1=sans&font2=sansboldhttp://stackimage.quickmediasolutions.com/flair.php?id=4&site=askubuntu&border=ffffff&background=3b5998&text=ffffff&title=dddddd&font1=serif&font2=serifitalic
Where can I get it?
Just visit stackimage.quickmediasolutions.com and follow the instructions.
How does it work?
StackImage fetches your current reputation using the API and creates an image based on the parameters supplied in the URL as follows:
http://stackimage.quickmediasolutions.com/flair.php?options
[Required]
id - the desired user id
site - the desired SE site (in this case 'askubuntu')
[Optional]
background - the color of the background
border - the color of the border
text - the color of the text
title - the color of the user's name
font1 - the font to be used for the badges *
font2 - the font to be used for the display name and rep *
* can be one of [mono, monobold, monobolditalic, monoitalic,
sans, sansbold, sansbolditalic, sansitalic,
serif, serifbold, serifbolditalic, serifitalic]
&ext=.jpg to the end of the URL. Sometimes forums don't like images without a '.jpg' or '.png' extension. This should fix that.
Existing Ubuntu mailing lists and forums have a good amount of traffic, perhaps having a signature tagline in people's email signature will help spread the word. For example
Joe Smith
[email protected]
Questions about Ubuntu? Ask the experts at http://askubuntu.com
Also a link in IRC on your /quit and /away messages
For those members here who are connected to the wider Ubuntu community, it might be useful to find opportunities for specific promotions. That is, to promote participation in answering a particular question on the Ubuntu Stack Exchange. (It might also work in reverse, prompting someone to ask a particular question here.)
It would take some additional effort to choose (and possibly summarize) a top notch question, but a user of this site who is also syndicated on the Ubuntu Planet could blog about a question here and invite people to come check it out. Of course, bloggers syndicated on other aggregators or who are have a few readers, and users of twitter, identi.ca, facebook, etc. could certainly do the same.
I figure this would work for several kinds of interesting questions:
Recently I noticed a blog post by maco about this question from this site which is a pretty good community-wiki-style question (no obvious definitive answer) although not marked as such.
Ubuntu teams participate in conferences around the world. For larger events such as FOSDEM, ScALE, etc. many teams already run Ubuntu booths. Some of these events are huge (French release parties have been known to top 5,000 people).
At OLF I put a simple "For ubuntu questions ask the experts at http://ubuntu.stackexchange.com" sign next to the business cards and opened the browser to an existing question an answer for a question I felt people would ask alot at the booth.
The existing Ubuntu Local Teams have an event lister of Ubuntu related events happening all over the world. Perhaps someone can volunteer to get in touch with upcoming teams having events.
SE has a feature which allows people to tweet and facebook their questions to their social networks. This serves two goals, it helps spread the site AND hopefully gets the person some exposure on their question.
I think a widget, similar to the countdown widgets and the 10.04 widget that Jono Bacon has on his site (check it out on the left hand side) that we could just leave lying around on our websites would be a good way to passively promote the site. The user flair widgets don't say what the site is, so aren't really a good option for this.
I think a lot of the main marketing push relies on the site coming out of beta and getting a proper (something.ubuntu.com) domain. Until then it looks very unofficial.
Other than that, we need to get listed in the main support sections. We'd be competing with Launchpad Answers so I'm not sure how feasible that is but it's important to the long-term success of this place.
We already have the search engine crowd. Several posts here rank top in Google.
We have some excerpts from Jono's book on building community that might be useful here:
and Fedora maintains a great list of press publications if someone wants to go down that route.
Please promote this site: http://ubuntu.shapado.com/
Perhaps I should have been a bit more verbose. While I am a big fan of SO in general, I think it is unfortunate to be basing a FLOSS community around a non-FLOSS windows centered stack.
I also believe that in denying the community the ability to decide where to direct revenue (from advertising fx) we are doing ourselves and the mission a disservice.
While it is true that we might be able to grow faster due to cross pollination from other StackExchange venues, the arguments related to google juice are without much merit, askubuntu is on its own domain and gains no benefit from being in the SE fold (apart from cross links).
In terms of promotion, we are in the start phase and could easily direct efforts at a FLOSS platform instead.
I hope this is not construed as an attack on the efforts of the people who worked at making askubuntu happen, I think you have done an amazing job and the site looks great :)
I have no doubt that you will succeed in making it the 'go to resource', which is precisely why I ask you to think twice and consider if we can't do one better, be it with shapado, osqa or something else entirely.
Much love -- unomi