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

["Dāvis"]

On Thursday, 3 April 2014 at 16:07:06 UTC, Meta wrote:
> 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.

Here's another example:
KDE Commit-Digest, a weekly overview of the development activity 
in KDE. http://commit-digest.org/

Only there haven't been new issues for a while...