Submit-Everywhere.com review: reducing the PAD pain

There are a lot of things that are simply wrong in PAD files. My previous experiences of PAD file submission for Resx Editor and Lokad ASP.Net Sales Forecasting were just terrible. I did end up submitting my PAD URLs at random for hours to hundreds of crappy directories (because most online directories do not even work) without knowing whether this work would actually lead anywhere.

Three weeks ago, it did bargain 80 euros or so and gave a shot to submit-everywhere.com and it saved me much more time that I would have even imagined.

Automated PAD guidelines analysis

The first and foremost added value of Submit-Everywhere (S.E.) is not submission, it’s PAD proofreading. Basically, once you’ve published your PAD, S.E. starts performing guidelines checks on your PAD file. The process is very similar to what is performed by FxCop for .Net code but transposed on PAD files. The issue is not too achieve a valid PAD document (which is almost completely trivial) but to achieve a well-designed PAD file. In this matter, I found out that S.E. had quite a lot of smart guidelines (ex: create a dedicated e-mail address for each PAD submission); after my initial submission I have been correcting more than a dozen of elements in my PAD file based on the S.E. suggestions.

Massive PAD submission

S.E. is not lying about its massive submission, S.E. is really submitting your PAD file to hundreds of websites. Actually, many websites require some minimal human intervention to validate the submission; and S.E. is precisely taking care of that for you. In addition, once the submissions are done, you receive a summary that recaps the status of all submissions; and most importantly, the reasons why you software did end-up rejected from certain directories. The most common reason for being rejected is that your product does not match the scope of the directory (some directories are specialized on video games for example).

As a final note, I would add that outsourcing your submission work to S.E. is really painless. The process is e-mail driven, you get an automated e-mail containing some instructions (usually a suggested change on your PAD file), you follow the instructions and finally you reply in order to get the next instructions. Each e-mail is self-explanatory which makes the process really simple to follow.

Until a better PAD standard is devised, Submit-Everywhere is definitively a must-have if you do not want to be driven nuts by PAD submissions.

Reader Comments (2)

Do you know how you could massively send a PAD file in English & French ? May 28, 2007 | Parisian Developer

The PAD standard is a mess for localization. If you want to do a really clean job (with localized screenshots and localized URLs), you will need to submit one PAD file for every language. If you’re interested in a more quick-and-dirty approach, you can use the minimum multi-language support of PAD (only the descriptions will be localized). Just go for www.rudenko.com to get the PADManager . The website is just plain ugly, but the PADManager application is solid and supports multi-language descriptions. May 28, 2007 | joannes