[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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