This is a good base. In general, I would suggest not shying away
from subheadings. It gives you more opportunities to catch the
eye and tends to allow readers to see the parts that interest
them more easily. Conversely, making phrases links tends to make
reading harder; would it be acceptable to just put the link
after? See below.
On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:25:07 UTC, Meta wrote:
The current format is somewhat similar to This Week in Rust. A
little opening blurb, followed by a paragraph detailing any
recent articles
For articles, I'd also recommend a sentence or three describing
what the article actually covers. To clarify, I'm thinking
something like this:
# Articles #
## Improving Performance With Static Polymorphism ##
Atíla Neves talks about how he retooled his serialiser library to
eliminate allocations and dramatically improve performance. He
explains the underlying idea in detail, then shows benchmarks
covering the possible improvements he mentioned.
* [Atíla's Blog]($url)
## Functional image processing in D ##
Vladimir Panteleev has written a "highlights reel" post to
demonstrate his overhauled graphics library with an emphasis on
composition, laziness, and templating.
* [Vladimir's Blog]($url)
followed by a couple of the big announcements, which each get a
whole paragraph to themselves
Broken up with subs, this is good.
followed by a list of one-line smaller announcements.
Suggest bulleted list, maybe below the important NG threads. But
what qualifies as a smaller announcement?
Next is Community Overview, with another short introductory
paragraph, and a couple of paragraphs detailing interesting
discussions from the newsgroup.
See the articles suggestion.
However, if I prune the lists to include only what I think is
interesting, somebody is bound to get upset (probably rightly
so). On the other hand, if I just randomly pick, some of the
good stuff will inevitably get passed over. I'm not sure how to
handle this fairly. Thoughts?
From my perspective, most PRs are probably not all that
interesting. If they are, they'll get documented in the
changelog. If there's a big hurly-burly about it on the NG, then
maybe it's worth more coverage under a "Notable Pulls" heading,
but it might not be so important on the whole. After all, it
won't affect most people until it makes it into a release anyway.
Last is Miscellania. for Adopt a Bug Report and Adopt a Bounty,
I'll choose a random bug report/bounty that people can tackle
(or not). The whole point is to try to mitigate the fact that a
lot of bug reports and/or bounties can go a long time without
any action, and get buried under new stuff coming in. I also
considered Adopt a Pull Request, to let people know about pull
requests sitting around without getting a review. I also
included Music for Hackers as a sort of fun little
afterthought. Thoughts?
All sounds fine by me, if you want to include it.
Newsletters are a common thing for distros to do...
...and then stop doing because of a lack of manpower. Andrei's
right to call it a marathon.
Thinking back, one common thing is to point major news coverage,
so a "D in the Press" might not be a bad idea when there's
something to put there. Developer interviews come up
semi-regularly (and are pretty light on their editorial needs,
usually), so it might be worth trying. I recall seeing some job
posting sections in the past, too.
I'll second the request for Bugzilla stats; they're a frequent
feature and it can help remind people to do filing, triage, and
the like. I'm told this is what we use to aggregate those for
GMN; maybe you can make it work for your case?
http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo/src/gwn/
It doesn't seem common for language communities to have an
"official" newsletter (that I've seen), but here's a few samples
of how they've been formatted/managed in the past at the distro
level; they may be helpful inspiration:
https://blogs.gentoo.org/news/2014/01/31/gentoo-monthly-newsletter-january-2014/
http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20071015-newsletter.xml (old,
weekly format)
https://www.archlinux.org/static/magazine/2010/ALM-2010-Jan.html
https://www.archlinux.org/static/magazine/2004/newsletter-2004-Dec-19.html
(old format)
https://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:Weekly_news_134
Cheers,
Wyatt
