I want to be free

I think it’s a nice idea to contribute to open source project at least to just highlight this fact in your CV/resume when you are looking for a job.

Benefits:

• you show your level of commitment to something
• money is not the only motivator for you
• the code written by you is publically visible — you don’t need to explain what major design patterns you know, which technologies you are familiar with and how good you usually polish your code, that all can be seen

I think it can be compared with marriage. Remember that Alec Baldwin quote  from “The Departed” movie?

Marriage is an important part of getting ahead: lets people know you’re not a homo; married guy seems more stable; people see the ring, they think at least somebody can stand the son of a bitch; ladies see the ring, they know immediately you must have some cash or your cock must work.

Once upon a time I took a look at my Google Analytics account and found out that phpclasses.org is 5th source medium for two my blogs (this one and my russian blog).

I have 8 classes submitted. Calculation shows that 7% of my blogs visitors are my classes downloaders and viewers for all the time my classes and blogs exist, and 11% – for last week.

Take into account, that

• I get these people to me without any move – I have just placed the links once.
• in-bound links improve Google PageRank
• count of links is limited only by your imagination ;]

To check that all my classes have all needed links in “Related links” section, I wrote a PHP script that adds a link if it’s not present on your class page. It was written fast so there not so much error checks; to use it, just

1. type your login/pass,
2. list IDs of your classes and
3. define the list of links to be placed in “Related links” section of every class page.

Script supports more than one login/pass pair. If such link is already present, it will be skipped. CURL is required for your PHP server.

You can download it and use for free.