Tuesday 1 May 2007

Advertising the ICFP Programming Contest

I think the ICFP Programming Contest is an established contest by now. The publicity chair of ICFP thinks that it will sell itself, and he is probably right. However, to be on the safe side, we started advertising the ICFP Programming Contest last week. And lo and behold, our server experienced a hit explosion! In the last week, http://www.icfpcontest.org/ got five times as many hits as usual. Even this blog about the contest gets a considerable amount of hits; more than my homepage, for example. (But I admit: my homepage is probably much more boring than this blog (is going to be).)

I'd like to ask you, reader, for help though. I've published the advertisement on a lot of places, and I guess you have read it somewhere. But do you know of a good place to advertise the contest, which I missed? You are welcome to forward the advertisement yourself, but you can also let me know, and I will do it. Actually, I've seen the advertisement, or variants of it, appear on a couple of places where I did not publish it. One of those, http://programming.reddit.com/, has generated more than 700 hits! So please contact me if you know a good place to advertise the contest.

Here is the list of places where I (or someone I know) advertised the contest: haskell, haskell-cafe, caml-list, plt-scheme, ruby-talk, fp-nl, prog-lang, types-announce, clean-list, erlang-questions, comp.lang.c, c++, dylan, functional, haskell, lisp, ml, prolog, python, ruby, scheme.

4 comments:

JEG2 said...

You say it was advertised in ruby. I'm not sure what that means. I'm on the ruby-talk mailing list (mirrored with comp.lang.ruby) and don't recall seeing the message. I definitely recommend putting the word out there though, if I didn't just miss it.

I'm looking forward to the contest and appreciate all you efforts.

James Edward Gray II

Johan Jeuring said...

I meant comp.lang.ruby. It was published there on April 26. I'll also publish it on ruby-talk.

Thanks!

rgrig said...

You should probably post something on the topcoder forums. Many people there are interested in this contest. (In fact, last year's first and third place teams are composed of fairly active members in that community.)

Johan Jeuring said...

Thanks for the suggestion, and for publishing the announcement. It has already generated tens of hits, according to our web server statistics.