(DO NOT POST TO HACKERNEWS/REDDIT/ETC.) RFC for a Community Newsletter for D: What's New in D Draft #1

[Wyatt]

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