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Hello,
I am writing you to let you know of a free new service which could help grow
your distribution and also make you a little money as well (15% referral
bonus). A few weeks ago I launched a brand new website http://www.makezero.com
to bring the open source community another tool to help spread its popularity
and usage. It was built to showcase the rapidly growing number of open source
distributions in an as interactive way as possible. Hopefully making those
Windows users a little more curious about what we're doing over here.
Currently this website has more than 330 distributions listed which are known
to be active still, including yours. It is more than just a directory though.
Each distribution has a webpage built automatically for it that comes with
historical release information, screenshots, user reviews, news articles,
download mirrors, and even its own forum. Future enhancements and tools are
already in the works. All of this of course is provided for free and requires
no maintenance on your part. We will do it all for you. We already have more
than 1200 screenshots and 1200 articles archived on the site and this number
grows quickly each day.
This is not your typical website however. The entire website was built
completely from scratch using the latest browser technologies such as XML,
DHTML, and AJAX to improve the responsiveness of it as much as possible. This
includes the forums, the onsite instant messaging system, and even the shopping
cart. There are a lot of features that are built into the site that are hidden
initially, but become available once you create a free member account. I do
hope you will spare a few minutes of your time to create a member account to
see what this site may offer to you and your distribution, and also to the open
source movement in general.
This website goes a little further though and also comes with very detailed
user profile pages which will try to help connect the many users of all 330+
distributions into one place. Hopefully in a better way than your typical
forum-based community. It'll also help new users find other users with shared
common interests as them in order to ease the transition to open source as
easily as possible. And of course, make new friends who know how to answer
difficult questions. It is very similar to myspace.com and those other popular
community websites except that this one doesn't have any banner ads and is very
modern. But in this case it is targeted specifically at the open source crowd
only.
You can also find here a very accurate XML based Ranking system in order to
properly judge the popularity of every distribution and yours as well. Each
distribution is categorized so if you want to know what the most popular Live
CD was on any particular day or time period then you just make a few selections
and in a few seconds you'll find out.
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REFERRAL PROGRAM
Like with many projects, the key to its success now is to get people to use it
and that is where you come in if you want to. If more people use this type of
website and how it tries to share the user base of each distribution, then more
people will try and use your distribution as well. So if you want to, you can
link to us or just tell your friends about us. We do have icons and images
available of various sizes and of course text links are fine too. I have
already provided a link to your website from makezero.com for informational
purposes and to give them the opportunity to locate a download mirror. I know
some of the larger projects don't really need any help, but my main intention
of writing you was just to let you know that we're out there.
As an added bonus you can also get 15% referral bonus on a customer's entire
shopping cart if they purchase anything on the website which came from a link
on your website. The system to keep track of referrers and the amount
purchased by each customer is already in place. Of course many of you don't
need the money but it is there if you want it, or you can have it pooled into a
fund to be donated to various deserving open source projects. Most of you
already have a PayPal donation link on your website so once a certain threshold
is reached, I will simply just send you the money using that method unless you
prefer to do it differently.
We provide our CDs at only $0.99 cents each and also give free shipping on
orders over $20.00 (or $40.00 to non-USA countries). What that means is many
customers who see this $0.99 cent deal sometimes end up buying 50 to 100 CDs at
once due to the low prices and because of the wide selection that we carry
(nearly all 330 distributions are currently available for purchase). That
means if they spend $100.00 on the website, you'll get $15.00. It's not much
but it'll score you a pair of movie tickets. It is very rare to find a place
who will sell you 100 professionally labeled CDs for under $100 dollars with
free shipping, but that's what we do here.
The shopping experience on this website is very sleek and is built on a very
secure AJAX/XML/SOAP foundation in order to provide your users the safest and
fastest online shopping experience as possible. Orders are usually processed
within 24 hours and just so you know, our standard CD we use to burn your
distribution is on Taiyo Yuden media. For those who also have distributions
that fit on Mini-DVD, Mini-CD, and Business Card CDs, we automatically provide
those media options for your users in case they prefer this format. All in
all, you have a very ideal and professional store to provide your users with in
the event they cannot download and burn their own isos. At the same time,
you'll also help grow our community which hopefully will help further the
growth of open source.
If you are interested in taking part of the referral program then feel free to
contact me anytime at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or you can just reply to this e-mail.
My personal goal is actually for a successful community site, and not a
successful store. But I had wanted a way of sustaining the sites costs without
relying on banner ads so a store was built in its place.
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makezero.com is only a few weeks old so don't expect to see much community
activity yet while you're there. Your participation of course is vital if this
site is to succeed so hopefully you will spend some time on it when you have a
chance to see if you can make any use of it. I am e-mailing all the
maintainers of the other distributions as I am e-mailing you at this moment and
hopefully we (or some of us) can join forces to somehow make the world of open
source an easier transition for the next wave of open source addicts.
To get you started, here are some sample pages of what this site has to offer:
Distribution: http://www.makezero.com/Distribution.aspx?pid=55
Forums: http://www.makezero.com/forums/
http://www.makezero.com/forums/Topic.aspx?id=1
Member Profile: http://www.makezero.com/member/Profile.aspx?id=1313
Rankings: http://www.makezero.com/rankings/Default.aspx?df=2005-10-31
Respectfully,
An Pham
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.makezero.com
P.S. - This website uses the latest browsers enhancements in order to provide
the best possible experience. It was built to attract the Windows crowd to try
out an open source distribution. It is highly recommended that you use newer
version of Mozilla / Firefox / IE before you visit this website. If you have
any questions or suggestions then feel free to contact me at anytime.
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