On Wednesday, 2 April 2014 at 14:31:49 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
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.
The links, especially the Github ones, tend to be quite long, and
I didn't want to take up too much space with them, especially
with the "one link per line" format. I think this might be okay
for the one-line announcements and pull-requests, as I think
people generally care more about what's at the actual link itself
(e.g., a pull request on Github or an announcement post in the
newsgroup) than one line in a list. I'll experiment with one
descriptive line plus a link just below and see how it looks.
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.
Yes, I think this is much better. Thanks for the suggestion.
Suggest bulleted list, maybe below the important NG threads.
But what qualifies as a smaller announcement?
That's what I'm trying to figure out. I may just use my own
judgement to figure out what's important, although I am open to
suggestions.
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.
That's true, it'll always be in the changelog. Already, though,
Dicebot has suggested that the -vgc pull should be featured more
prominently. I agree, and I am somewhat worried about making a
"wrong" choice for what to feature.
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.
Good idea. However, right now this info is sporadic enough that I
can just include/not include a section featuring it when it comes
up, or put it in the announcements.
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/
I'll take a look. Also, what is GMN?
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
Thanks for the links. The word "newsletter" is probably a
misnomer, as that makes this sound more professional than it is.
This is really just an attempt to aggregate the important news
together in one place, the same as TWiR.
