Open Source Boosts Traffic
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Monday, 1st March 2010
When I recently released a chunk of my code into the wild, I didn't really think much of it. I had written a two-sided multi-select control, which I had created as a plugin for the jQuery framework. I thought it might be useful - so I added it to the official jQuery website for people to go ahead and use.
What I didn't realise is just how popular this would be and my traffic has boomed since I published the plugin.
To get a bit of context, here are the official figures for
February 2009. There's a pretty good day at 40 page requests and a
rough visible average across the rest of the month of 5 pages a day.

As you can see from the start of
February 2010, the website is a lot busier anyhow, with up to 50 pages a
day being served. On the 11th, I published version 1 of the two-sided
multi-select plugin and from that day right up to the end of the month I
pretty much doubled the popularity of the website. This was backup up
by the fact that the top page for February was the jQuery
two-sided multi-selector project page.

This boost in traffic comes despite the fact that there are thousands of plugins for the jQuery framework - probably including similar projects to the one I gifted to the community.
All these images appear courtesy of amCharts.com and Swift Stats.