Yes, here on this forum is my suggestion, with “wiki” editing turned on for multiple users.
Yes, some sort of proper email sending infrastructure. Mailgun powers sending email for this forum, and it has support for lists and so might be used.
Both are suggestions. I’m happy to help with tech / implementation details, it’s up to the people who volunteer to do the work how exactly they want to operate.
Just to be clear:
We are looking for 2-3 volunteers to write for and curate content for the newsletter.
No technical skills required.
I’d be more than happy to make occasional contributions.
Side note: Anyone recall Daniel Bairds (or was it @simon Bairds) newsletter about TW called WhitWhat, maybe a decade ago? (I believe it can be found in the google groups…)
I would be happy to write articles / short notes bimonthly.
@twMat and @Mohammad thank you to both of you for stepping up.
What we really need to get this off the ground is one or more volunteers that can take the lead on organizing this, and help co-ordinate, delegate and curate the writing that others might do as time allows them.
It would need to be someone that can dedicate a little time to this somewhat regularly.
I have the time and am happy to volunteer. I just have some concerns about what technical skills might be required. What would help most of all would be either an example to go off of be it a visual mock-up or a newsletter for something else that uses the format folks here would want used.
I think a lot of people have different images in mind about the term newsletter. Perhaps “weekly news round up” might be more useful as a phrase – and I would suggest starting this with a page here in the forum.
So the technical skills required would be: composing posts in the forum and editing them.
I planned to do my own blog, and habitually collect content that could be used to publish, so I also volunteer to be involved in this;
Thanks to everyone for their enthusiasm for this idea.
An important point is that the best placed people to take up the editor role may not be the familiar faces who frequently engage in the discussions here.
The stats show that there are significant numbers of people who visit this forum nearly every day of the year, whilst making hardly any posts. In fact, the people posting here make up a rather small fraction of the total number of people who read the posts. That is all entirely to be expected: for a wide range of reasons, the majority of people don’t post, but instead get everything they need by reading the discussions involving others. (That is my experience personally with StackOverflow; I’ve consulted it countless times over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever made a post there).
I think the ideal attributes for this role are:
That’s a lot to ask for! And so that’s why we may need a small team of people working together.
Ideally, we’d construct a news stream in a format that allows us to publish it in multiple ways:
Taken together, that means that the most useful thing for us would be for the news items to be gathered as tiddlers in one or more wikis that we can scrape into GitHub. So, if we had a single contributor then tiddlyhost would work. If we wanted a group to collaborate then we could set up a shared multiuser TiddlyWiki instance on https://xememex.com/
Each news item might be modelled as a text tiddler with tags, optional associated images and links. I think we’d probably want to use a fixed convention for titles like “YYYYMMDDhhmm”, keeping the human readable title in the “caption” field.
What is our presence on Discord? A quick search didn’t find it.
The thing about mailgun confused me. That would require both technical and financial resources, wouldn’t it?
Another great model for this newsletter idea might be ‘This week in the IndieWeb’ (https://indieweb.org/)
@boris, @saqimtiaz
I would suggest to setup the site perhaps a TW site and lets start with authors contributed to Tips & Tricks, Filters and Showcases.
I think it is good to start with this minimum and lets other join!
Sounds like Jeremy is looking at a multi user Xememex, which looks great. I don’t know anything about that setup unfortunately.
@Mohammad want to start a new thread with what you think the next steps are?
It might be useful to have a kick off call. @jeremyruston how do you want to proceed?
I thought the current tips and tricks (published in this forum) can be revised with examples, more explanations, to be cooked for Newsletter. So, for start we have already some materials to go with.
Yes I suggested just using this forum to start. It’s up to you @Mohammad and others here on how to proceed. We appreciate you stepping up.
Perhaps there is value tagging items in talk.tiddlywiki that are to be used in and/or were published in the “news letter”.
I think it a very good idea!
Why? Because it could (1) be a bridge between seasoned officiandos and people looking for clear info about TW and its uses; (2) be a better way to more widely Showcase interesting viable end results [i.e. TW’s / Apps in the wild] — rather than mainly technical demos of partial solutions; and (3) give better leverage to diverse social media to promo TW appropriately.
I have two caveats …
Frequency? Maybe once every week (or even two weeks) is too much to do well? Dunno!
Who Will Do It? Editing newsletters well, imo, is a skill. It should not be just recycling? Rather it, maybe, needs the development of a presentational method to contextualise the materials?
I thought your list helpful. I’d add, myself … “Best Use Of Browsers” [e.g. an issue on how to use stuff like bookmarklets in harmony with TW?]
Just passing thoughts
TT
A not uncommon way to handle newsletters in specialist subject areas is to publish general content including excepts which point to the the more detailed coverage. If the newsletter was not regular enough we would never cover the subject area’s that come up. But to combat overly lengthy content providing links to more detailed content is wise.
