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Marketing and its impact

Recently, I tried to make BOLTS known also outside of the FreeCAD Forums and the OpenSCAD Mailing List/Forums. I maintain a list of places that are frequented by people who could be interested in BOLTS, and from time to time I choose one and post/submit/write something. If you know more such places, please tell me in the comments for this post or in the GitHub issue.

I am quite happy with what arose out of my attempts so far:

FreeCAD macro repository

The FreeCAD wiki has a macro repository where people can post useful macros. BOLTS for FreeCAD is technically a macro, so I wrote a description page for it. Almost immediately after I added the english version, FreeCAD user mario52 improved it and translated it to French and Italian. I had not known how to create translations of wiki pages, but with this example I could copy from that and also create a German version, so it is now available in four languages.

Reprap Development tracker

A while ago I stumbled upon the Reprap development tracker, a page where one can announce Reprap related projects on is working on, connect them with other projects and subscribe to them. I added an entry for BOLTS, but the site seems relatively dead to me, the last submission before that dates 2 months back.

Bld3r

Bld3r is a social site focused on 3D printing. Users can submit projects or links, and then comment and vote on them. The BOLTS entry has already gotten a few votes, so I guess a few people saw it and liked it.

Reprap Forums

I also posted an announcement in the RepRap Forum about 3D Design tools. This announcement developed into an interesting discussion about how BOLTS could be adapted for use with SolidWorks, and a number of ideas and suggestions came up during this discussion.

GitHub

GitHub shows the number of people that have starred a repository, i.e. marked it as interesting. BOLTS is already by far the most popular of my repositories. The number of stars jumped suddenly after my initial announcements, but is still growing slowly since. And some of these people really follow what is happening in the repositories, as they comment on issues from time to time. In particular there is a interesting discussion going on about exporting parts to STEP.

Unfortunately I can not access the visitor statistics for the webpage, as it runs on GitHub servers.

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