Behind the Scenes of Issue 73

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 73

A special anniversary, new vendors, new discount code, some developments, etc.

dovenyi
Published April 11, 2022

Creators! Feel free to tip me off about your keyboard related projects to bring them to 100K readers.

Hello friends,

Welcome back for another edition of my weekly roundup, this time Issue #73 of Keyboard Builders' Digest, a DIY keyboard focused newsletter and blog from Tamas Dovenyi. If you are new to this, you can read how this started out and what this is all about nowadays. If you like what you see, you can subscribe to the newsletter (free) and donate some bucks to keep this otherwise free and ad-free project alive.

Let's jump right in.

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A special anniversary

I have a small spreadsheet with my supporters' metadata (to generate the supporter list both on the site and for the newsletter) and as I was cleaning it up the other day I realized my very first supporter threw her first few bucks at me exactly one year ago. So this is another anniversary! :)

I just wanted to say thanks to Diana because at the time I was on the brink of abandoning this project and her donation gave me a real boost.

For history's sake: I started with embarrassing her because right after this first donation on Patreon I figured out that as a non-US resident I'd need some paperwork to actually access my precious $5 so I asked her to withdraw the sum the same day and I quickly set up a Buymeacoffee account.

Fast forward to late 2021 when BMC parted ways with PayPal and spammed supporters with emails asking them to resubscribe – resulting in a loss of half of my regular supporters…

Again, Diana was the first one who resubscribed before I could have any chance to reach out to her to ask for another favour. :D Namely, to donate directly through PayPal. Thus, while everybody else supports me directly through PayPal these days, Diana – as a curiosity – remained my last and single supporter on BMC. :D Thanks again!

New vendors

TurtleKeebs
beekeeb
fingerpunch
frostgear
Yong Qiu

Well, most of them are not really new but newly added to the keyboard vendor database:

E.g. TurtleKeebs from Canada has been around since last August. Now, co-runner Leon was kind enough to offer you a 10% discount (code: KBDNEWS – 10% off all orders $20 CAD or above. One use per customer.) More details here. Thanks Leon!

CFTKB suspended. Bryan was reported as unresponsive to say the least so until further notice there is a warning at the top of that page.

Developments

Vendor contact icons. Fingerpunch's Sadek asked if, beside the usual vendor data, I could share his Discord link too, so I thought I start to collect all the social media contacts of the vendors and display them with nice icons. Only 363 vendor to go… :D
Handling reported entries. Yeah, unfortunately, I had to implement some sort of warning to indicate reported shops – with regards to CFTKB.
And there were several tiny developments in the background which will hopefully help the maintenance part of the site – but are not visible for you.

New newsletter provider?

In the background, I'm testing an alternative newsletter provider. Not a free solution either but considerably cheaper compared to MailChimp.

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That's all folks. Feel free to comment in this issue's r/mk thread, and as always: keep learning and building.

Cheers, Tamás

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Published on Mon 11th Apr 2022. Featured in KBD #73.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial