I wanted to get some content posted first and will be cleaning up the formatting & organization next. I’m still learning about stylesheets and CSS and I’m not sure how long I’ll be spending going down that rabbit hole.
I will be posting new newsletters on the first and third Sundays of the month no-later-than midnight UTC - 5 Eastern USA covering the time in-between.
If anyone has anything they would like to see included that I may have missed in this edition or in the future let me know.
My to-do list for the newsletter includes building documentation on how it’s put together, so any new person who finds it can see and learn from how it’s put together. That’s why I’m keeping the template tiddlers for example visible in the table of contents “Wiki Files” section.
I agree! I just pushed an update with the centralized river theme and some other small format changes that will hopefully help. I’ll keep working on it.
I appreciate @PaulH’s effort but I thought the newsletter and the content was going to be a collaborative effort, the language used in this thread does not sound like that?
It feels to me a little premature to be doing all but private experimenting on a newsletter now because there is so much that can be added. I would build such a newsletter wiki myself so differently. Here is an old an incomplete example I had a long time a go for a blog https://tones-blog.tiddlyhost.com/, which could generate periodical newsletter.
For me the content ideas are not the problem, it is the quality and presentation.
@PaulH kindly volunteered for the task and we had a chat over the weekend where he agreed to produce a mockup of the raw data underlying the newsletter. It is definitely a collaborative effort, but just like the core development we still need people to step up and actually do the work.
The important thing first is to establish a model of what we’re trying to do, with a clear editorial style that can then be applied consistently regardless of who is submitting the newsletter items.
The next step is to format it and deliver it as a newsletter, which we’ll do manually initially, but hope to get some automation set up.
Apologies I should have communicated more clearly, it’s not my intention to exclude anybody from this process.
As I said in the other thread:
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.
I reached out to @PaulH to welcome him as a new contributor, and to explore whether he was willing to take on this role.
It is a team effort. Just as with the core, working as a team in open source boils down to individuals doing a little bit of work on their own and then sharing it with the rest of the group for feedback.
As I mentioned above, I believe that doing this role well requires a consistent, carefully thought through editorial approach to ensure that the newsletter meets the needs of the community at large.
I’m not trying to invent something new here: the tech community has a deep culture of weekly newsletters. For example, https://javascriptweekly.com/ is typical. I’ve subscribed to these sort of newsletters in the past and have noticed that the successful ones have a well defined editorial voice. They are not just an aggregate of snippets written and submitted by the community at large (as it happens we already have that in https://talk.tiddlywiki.org).
@PaulH has stepped up and produced an excellent first draft, and offered to take on this editorial role. There are still many important roles for others to fill:
Contributing ad hoc suggestions to the editor(s)
Becoming a co-editor to help spread the load, if needed
Helping get the email list infrastructure up and running, and making it possible to sign up from tiddlywiki.com
CURATION: What I also think needs to be said, is that you have exercised good critical editorial judgement on WHAT to include. That matters more than anything!
A summary newsletter needs that. I doubt that aspect can ever be automated. It needs skill.
During the time when I was exploring Obsidian, I came across this obsidian roundup website: roundup - Obsidian Roundup It has rss feed and each post is nicely structured into sections (Updates, Plugin News, Showcases, etc). We could use some inspiration from it.
I just wanted to suggest you may have a good reason to use titles of YYYYMMDD, such as for RSS or Permalinks but it is not very aesthetic, ie not very good looking.
I have a tool that may help in this alt-title-display.json (775 Bytes) just add a more nicely formatted title eg “2nd December 2022 Newsletter” in the alt-title field, perhaps automatically when you are creating the tiddler, an on your wiki the alternative title will be displayed on the tiddler while maintaining the original tiddler title. Consider also setting the caption for lists.
I think it a good choice to establish a universal ordering system.
Your suggestions to @PaulH are useful too for “presentational polish”, helpful suggests.
But I’m not quite clear yet where the final thing will arrive and what would be a good route on displayed date. But I do think Paul’s basic titling idea remains sound.
