Behind the Scenes of Issue 105

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 105

Giveaway follow-up, advent calendar, Keebsmas, new vendors, discounts, meetups, etc.

dovenyi
Published December 2, 2022

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

Hey y'all,

Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #105), a weekly roundup of this DIY keyboard focused newsletter and blog from Tamas Dovenyi – that's me. 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.

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PSA

Check your inbox and spam folder frequently this weekend!
I'm still quite overwhelmed. Thanks for all the feedback and sorry if I don't react to your emails. These days I only reply if it has a purpose/function.
That said, I'm VERY grateful that so many people have sent me content this week: links, heads-ups. That really helps. Thanks!

Giveaway

I'm at about 70-80% of processing the giveaway, so some of you can still win. I had to temporarily remove the full list of prizes, leaving only the unclaimed items – because it confused some winners when choosing their preference. The more pricey ones are gone, and some winners got back to me with a thanks and that they can't find or wouldn't like anything from the remaining goodies.

That said, instead of contacting winners one by one to ask for their preferences, lets make it the other way around for the rest of the prize pool.

I'll spam the last 20-30 winners at once on a first come first serve basis. So don't forget to check your inbox and spam folder frequently the next few days!

Advent Calendar

By now you've probably heard of this advent calendar, so instead of the inspiration or origin lets talk about some difficulties I experienced at start.

First of all, I managed to publish eight posts by accident right on the first day… :D They were hidden, not visible on the front page, but could be accessed in the archive for about an hour.

Secondly, I should have thought of this but there's apparently a huge difference if you target such an advent calendar for a specific country/region or for an international audience visiting from various time zones. :D

Thinking out loud:

Publishing the Dec 1 article by Ben Vallack at 0:00 CET (my time zone, GMT+1) meant:

East Asian readers could see it at 7-9AM (their local time) which is perfect to include it in their mourning routine. ;)
Most European readers had to stay up until midnight but that's OK for night owls, myself included. Otherwise they saw it next morning. No problem with that.
But people of the Americas saw these posts "one day earlier" since at Dec 01 0:00 CET there was Nov 30, 3-8PM in the US. :D

That's not really a problem, most people could probably figure out what's going on with the dates indicated. Well, not a problem until you'd like to properly announce these posts e.g. on r/mk or Twitter. Because by the time I wake up in the morning in Europe, two third of my readers have already seen the actual write-up.

So from day 2 I publish the posts at 9:00 CET. How does it look like in some extreme places (at least relative to Europe)?

Japan (+8): a nice afternoon/evening read.
Europe: morning read.
West Coast (-9): midnight, but it's the same date at last! ;)

So that's the new release time.

This way I can announce new posts in the morning (my local time) on Twitter for Japanese readers who are overrepresented there. And in the afternoon (my local time) on r/mk where most people at this time come from North America I guess. Amen.

Keebsmas

Keebsmas is an annual charity fundraising event for the mechanical keyboard community originally started in 2020 by keebnewb, jnlybean, and Davis of 3DKeebs.

For 12 days leading up to December 25th, a featured streamer will be hosting giveaway prizes, and on Christmas Day, there'll be a special 12 hour stream to wrap it all up.

To date we have raised over $21,000 for charity thanks to our generous donors and participants from the keyboard community! We hope to continue this tradition this year by raising money for DIY Girls.

I'll post more details about this in the run-up to Dec 13. Or you can check for updates here: Keebsmas.com

Pic:

(Thanks to Susan of Mintlodica for the heads-up! And Ele too!)

Vendor database

After last week's feature of the LEGO compatible 65% Adam, KBDcraft offered you a 5% discount (code: KBDNEWS). Since this is an affiliate code too, I can see how many items are sold. It's crazy.
Custom KBD offered you a 5% discount (code: KBDNEWS). (This is the Australian Custom KBD, not Custom Keyboard Co. in the US.) Related post: Sea-Picro.

Meetup database

Orlando Mini-Meet (Dec 10) added.
ClackyCon in Utrecht, NL added (Feb 25).
Saguaro Keeb Social (Jan 14) added.

As always, this meetup database is both a calendar and an archive so feel free to send me upcoming events or even ones from the recent past to make this collection as comprehensive as possible.

Donations

No new donors this week. Thanks to all the supporters who set up a recurring donation.

If you can afford to help, here is the donation form.

Stats

I haven't updated the about page with the November stats yet.

Anyway, my CDN registered more than 80,000 unique visitors in 30 days which is a new record.

Small developments

Updates to the giveaway page
Meetup database: the ClackyCon page made me aware that urls in the venue field are not turned into links automatically. Fixed.
And I've worked a LOT on the advent calendar "engine". I hope this will be much easier next year with all the coding already done.
E.g. I made a script to handle the previous/next post box since the order of articles may change and it has to keep track of already published posts (with link) and still hidden ones (plain text).
On a similar note, I had to make a proper preview feature for contributors.

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That's all for today. Thanks for reading.

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 Fri 2nd Dec 2022. Featured in KBD #105.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial