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

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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.