nixos-weekly
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NixOS
NixOS weekly lost momentum again
At this time of writing NixOS newsletter (previously NixOS weekly) is being revived.
Current state:
- We sent out 4 newsletters (June/July/August/September). October one coming out in few days.
- We reduced cadence to a month.
- We are sending it out first Monday of the month.
- Categories of newsletter are still to be discussed, but this is something we will always try to improve upon. At this moment the categories are: (1) Highlights, which includes stories about Nix community, releases, teams updates, fundraising, etc... (2) News, other news that we collect from discourse.nixos.org. Those that we also post on social media.
That said we are not completely done. As said below in the comments we still need to:
- [ ] Add subscribe to newsletter form to the website (where currently nixos weekly is -> https://nixos.org/blog/)
- [ ] Add already sent list of newsletters to the website (where currently nixos weekly is -> https://nixos.org/blog/)
- [ ] Retire weekly.nixos.org and redirect to the new location
Original issue description:
Three possible directions to move forward- discontinue and recommend subscribers to configure Announcements notifications in a final email
- forward discourse Announcements to the subscribers. May not be legal?
- revive it
@BryanHonof wanted to revive it, but maybe we can integrate that into the upcoming nixos.org rework by @lucperkins? Then we'd have a unified workflow (e.g. open a PR to create a new page every week, anyone can make suggestions with links, maintainer merges it after a week) which is also simpler to deal with technically - just rebuild the web site.
It seems to me that the forum has essentially replaced NixOS weekly, probably because it's more visible and has a low barrier to posting news. See for example the Announcements or Links sections. Perhaps NixOS weekly could indeed be made a manual selection of some of these post, and be actually weekly.
Perhaps we could even use Discourse for everything here. It's possible to get an RSS feed from a category by appending .rss to the link, e.g. https://discourse.nixos.org/c/announcements/8.rss. Maybe the website should do nothing more than render a page from a topic like that. What do you think?
That would certainly be the cheapest solution. But it has a few caveats, such as what if thread titles change? We should clarify this with the moderation team (@ryantm @zimbatm) as the burden of cleaning up noise would be on them in that case. Also it should be documented clearly how the newsletter comes into being, and that in this case it would be deliberately not curated.
I feel like the value of NixOS Weekly was that it was curated, whereas anyone can post in the Announcements category if it is a vaguely Nix-related topic.
I think so too, someone should still do a selection of the posts. Also, it would be really good to have a section about upcoming changes and other development news like RFCs periods, etc.
So, I've received this newsletter:
We are back!
After 2 years of silence the NixOS newsletter is reborn. In the past you might have known it as a weekly.nixos.org. In front of you is the edition of the NixOS newsletter for the news from the month of June 2023.
Questions:
- who is maintaing the newsletter?
- where is the process of selecting the items taking place?
- why is weekly.nixos.org still up and linked to the nixos.org website if it's dead?
- can you please stop using 256-characters-long tracking URLs? It's very annoying.
3. why is weekly.nixos.org still up and linked to the nixos.org website if it's dead?
I'd very much like to see NixOS weekly come back in some form. There's plenty of great posts to link and share but not sure the status these days. Thanks for all that have worked on it thus far!
We're sort of running newsletter (we're releasing it monthly) in the shadow last 3 months. We are doing this because of 2 reason. (1) we were not sure we would be able to deliver newsletter regularly (2) and it was the easiest way to start it.
And when I said that we are running it in a shadow I meant:
- there is no subscribe to newsletter on the website
- there is no list of sent newsletters
- retire weekly.nixos.org and point it to the new location
Of course we would like to change that and get this on the website if possible yesterday.
If somebody would like to help out with the newsletter, I'll be more that happy to show you how it is done and jumping from joy if you even make it better. A simple start would be one of the above points. I suggest you join the marketing team room on matrix and ping me there.
RE: @rnhmjoj sorry for late reply
Questions: 1. who is maintaing the newsletter? Marketing team
2. where is the process of selecting the items taking place?
Yes, we're taking it from few categories on the discourse.nixos.org.
3. why is weekly.nixos.org still up and linked to the nixos.org website if it's dead?
Just initial problem with getting everything in place.
4. can you please stop using 256-characters-long tracking URLs? It's very annoying.
We're using brevo.com to send email. Previously it was sendinblue.com. It was selected because of best fit for our use case and budget fit. I'm not aware how to remove the tracking URLs, but I'd be happy if you point me to the tutorial how to do it. All I could find on this topis is: https://help.brevo.com/hc/en-us/articles/11643306229906, which is how our newsletters are setup.
I'm going to hijack this ticket, reword it a bit and create smaller tickets from it (as described) in a previous comment.
there is no list of sent newsletters
That's really not great. @garbas is there any original content that you could post to Discourse, or is it just a compilation of Discourse announcements?