Behind the Scenes of Issue 116

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 116

Newsletters merged, new shops & meetups, small developments, etc.

dovenyi
Published March 17, 2023

Would you like to contribute to this year's MK Advent Calendar? Here are the guidelines for authors, along with last year's edition for reference.

Hey y'all,

It seems this was an unusually prolific week for you and all the contributors so I had to get back with a new issue after one week.

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Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #116), a weekly/fortnightly 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, subscribe to the newsletter (free) and donate some bucks to keep this otherwise free and ad-free project alive.

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Newsletter update

OK, the migration to buttondown should be done now. Today's newsletter will be sent out to all 2,671 subscribers via this cool and friendly service I've been testing and comparing to MailChimp for almost a year now.

Justin, the guy behind buttondown, was kind enough to offer me a huge discount, so I ended up paying a fraction of what I had to pay at MailChimp. I moved all the "old" MailChimp subscribers to the new place, paid the whole annual fee upfront, so I can hopefully forget about fees and looking for alternatives for a year, or until I reach 5,000 subscribers.

Wanna help?

If you answered my recent poll indicating you'd contribute to the newsletter fee I just paid, this is a good time to send me a few bucks. Thanks in advance! (As always, I'm grateful for any sum, but sending 1 USD makes not much sense because the PayPal fee is 35% in this case. With $2 it's still more than 20%.)

Vendor database

New shops and updates to the database of keyboard vendors:

Skeleton Keyboard (Tokyo) added.

Meetup database

New entries to the meetup database:

Madison Mech Meetup, WI, US // Apr 1 (Thanks Vianney!)
DMOC #2, Chicago // March 19
KeebKaigi 2023, Matsumoto, Japan // May 10
ClackyCon aftermovie 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.

In the mailbox

Still on its way, but after last week's post KBDcraft offered me one of their improved LEGO-compatible Adam kits with all the bells and whistles. Thanks!

And Keebmonkey has a new split ergo in the making, they asked me if I'd like to test it. (Sure.)

Donors

No new donors this week.

As I write it in my year-end summary, maintaining this site takes a lot of energy and time. (According to the Reddit Recap stats that's 100 hours per month on Reddit only.) If you'd like and can afford to help, here is the donation form.

And many thanks to everyone who supported this project in any of its development stages.

Developments

I've extended the cache system I wrote for the trending posts page for some other slower pages. E.g. the shops or the home page.
A small update to the meetup database for events with multiple videos.

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That's all for today. Thanks for checking by.

Cheers, Tamás

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Published on Fri 17th Mar 2023. Featured in KBD #116.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial