[Pdx-pm] Fwd: Newsletter from O'Reilly UG Program, March 7

Eric Wilhelm scratchcomputing at gmail.com
Fri Mar 9 12:10:44 PST 2007


# from chromatic
# on Friday 09 March 2007 11:26 am:

>>I've given up on editing around the
>> non-perl parts and the whole thing is too big to post on the list.  
>> Perhaps O'Reilly would do well to focus the newsletter a bit?
>
>What kind of focus would you like to see?

Umm, a Perl focus for a Perl user's group?  Probably something involving 
pre-selected categories (since web tech, sql, and etc have a fair 
amount of overlap.)  Barring that, something much shorter (e.g. just 
titles) with links to the details.  When e-mail hits the mailing-list 
40KB size threshold, the one-dimensional medium has been exhausted long 
before that.  However, last I checked it wasn't available online in a 
newsletter format (which seems silly given that groups are typically 
archived.)

Example:  what we currently get looks like:

<quote>
----------------------------------------------------------------
New Releases
----------------------------------------------------------------
-A+, Network+, Security+ Exams in a Nutshell
-ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns: Rough Cut Version
-Ajax on Java
...
----------------------------------------------------------------
Upcoming Events
----------------------------------------------------------------
-Peter Morville, "Information Architecture & Search" International
 Master Class, Sydney, Australia--Mar 8-9
-O'Reilly at PMA, Las Vegas, NV--Mar 8-11
...
----------------------------------------------------------------
Conference News
----------------------------------------------------------------
-RailsConf 2007 is now sold out--Get On the Waiting List Now
-Register for ETech 2007--Mar 26-29
-Register for the MySQL Conference and Expo--Apr 23-26
...
----------------------------------------------------------------
News
----------------------------------------------------------------
-David Pogue to visit NYPC March 20
-Call For Makers: Maker Faire Bay Area 2007--Deadline Extended 
 to March 18
</quote>

And after we've seen all of the news-item titles comes the other 15 
pages (which I trimmed) with a blurb and link for each one (possibly 
recategorized.)  Why not:

----------------------------------------------------------------
News <Put a link here. I'll click it if I'm interested in one.>
----------------------------------------------------------------

Currently, if I'm interested in a title from the news-items section, I 
have to search in my e-mail for the next occurrence just to find a 
link, which I then click.

If the "News" link took me to a page (hint: web pages load faster 
without images on them) with links for all of the titles, I would get 
there more quickly.  That would be about 1.5 pages (~100 lines) long.  
It's a news*letter* not a news*paper*!

Maybe this is too minimalist for some.  The typical solution for that is 
to have a link at the top to get to the page with the dancing bears.

--Eric
-- 
Chicken farmer's observation:  Clunk is the past tense of cluck.
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