Publishing software in a convenient way

What do you mean by "and the cites counted"? Do you mean something like Google Scholar will index it?

If so, then the common route in CS is to publish something that introduces the program (although the code often lives on github). Then people will often cite that paper and or the repo whenever they use your program.

That isn't necessarily a ton of work either. Many conferences have workshops or industry tracks (in case you are an engineer and not a researcher). Also, see dgraziotin's answer on publishing a paper in an open access journal so that others could cite his work.

One option is to put it onto Github, which allows you to mint a DOI so that it can be easily cited by others, which in turn allows you to quantify its impact.

If you are a member of an academic institution you should check with your library services. Increasingly they regard themselves as custodians of data, and so may have a standard process for archiving and sharing code and datasets. Often this takes the form of a landing page with a stable URL and including a description of the code, with links to the source (perhaps tagged versions mapping to what you used in your publications) and compiled executables, if appropriate.

You're already publishing something, and this would be the ideal object to cite for people that will use your software in the future.

I would suggest putting the software on a repository, or even on your own website. Then just ask that people cite your paper if they use your software for a publication.

Some examples from my field:

• http://www.gromacs.org/Gromacs_papers
• http://autodock.scripps.edu/resources/references
• https://swissmodel.expasy.org/docs/references

Many of the articles listed there got 100s or 1000s of citations.