Behind the Scenes of Issue 119

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 119

100K monthly visitors, new shops, meetups, Glove80 in the mailbox, developments, etc.

dovenyi
Published April 7, 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,

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Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #119), 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, subscribe to the newsletter (free) and donate some bucks to keep this otherwise free and ad-free project alive.

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This issue may be shorter than usual, but I wanted a quick release before the Easter recess – in many countries this is a much bigger deal than in the US, with holidays on Friday and/or Monday. And I also wanted to get back to the Friday emails so last-minute meetup additions (usually on Saturdays) can be brought to you in time.

Glove80 in the mailbox

I got the Glove80, sent me by MoErgo's Stephen for free (thanks!), and I'm working on a veeery long, thorough review.

I love this keyboard's look and all the small details from the spring-loaded screws to the clicky toggle power switches, but – despite the fact people with larger hands give overwhelmingly positive feedback – it seems it's not for my rather long fingers. Or maybe my pinkies are too short for the length of my other fingers.

Pic:

Anyway, this is my first encounter with ZMK, and I made a banal mistake when recreating my logical layout. (Mistaken mod taps for mod functions, but fortunately figured it out before embarrassing myself with asking a question on Discord, so luckily nobody realized I'm an idiot. Don't tell this anyone!)

The point is, I need a bit more time to turn the Glove80 into my work setup, plus to get used to the physical layout and finish the review – hopefully in the coming days. And I also may ask Mrs KbdNews (with much smaller hands) to test it as well.

100K visitors/month

The number of unique monthly visitors has topped 100K for the first time.

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but from mid-March there has been an apparent increase in daily visitor numbers.

Pic:

Previously, I was very close to 100K users in December, and if I wouldn't have gone on holiday in the last days of the year than I could have hit the mark.

However, that involved the MK Advent Calendar campaign which was quite stressful to organize, edit and roll out daily, often in the last minute, so I wouldn't have considered that near-100K an organic and sustainable number – at least at the time.

As expected, stats precipitated in January and especially February when, due to health and family reasons, the weekly newsletter turned into a fortnightly one.

But for the past two weeks it was obvious that the 100K achievement is inevitable. The growth is organic this time, there was no seasonal boost like the calendar in December.

Well, given I don't display ads on kbd.news, this is largely symbolic, it has no practical effect, but I wanted to commemorate this milestone.

Vendor database

New shops and updates to the database of keyboard vendors:

UniKeys (Shanghai) added. Use the KBDNEWS discount code for 7% off. (Thanks Dashan!)
Some boutique shops added: Aiglatson Studio (Thailand), Jacky Lab (China), MVKB (Belgium), SagakLabs (South Korea). I'm not sure these will stay in the database, I just wanted to clear my browser tabs without loosing these urls. :)
MKultra is shutting down?! News like this break my heart. Erik is a long-time supporter of the blog and he was on my list of potential Advent Calendar contributors last year but it seemed he was not in the mood, mentioning difficulties.
qweebs.com is down, archived (thanks Pavel!).

Meetup database

Lot's of new entries to the meetup database:

Worcester Meetup added (MA, USA, Apr 8).
KeebKaigi updated with more details (Matsumomto, JP, May 10).
Mode Meet Up (Weymouth, MA, USA, May 27).
Milwaukee Keyboard Meetup (June 17).
CannonKeys 2023 Meetup (Pawtucket, RI, Sept 9).
Gallery added: New York Meetup.

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.

Donors

New donations came from Dávid Kovács and Matthew Peverill. Thank you guys!
And many thanks to everyone who supported this project in any of its development stages.

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.

Developments

New developments:

With the newly introduced cache system I successfully messed up most JS scripts, e.g. the filtering functions of the vendor database (thanks for reporting this Keebs#0001!) or the map on the meetup page.
Taking a closer look at the vendor database code there were other issues as well: e.g. the ortho filter didn't work. I mean it's never worked due to a typo. :) It's fixed now, but I realized I haven't really used this tag when classifying shops so that's something I'll hopefully be able to do soon.
Something happened to the vendor pages in dark mode.

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That's all for today. Thanks for checking by. As always: Keep learning and building!

Cheers, Tamás

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Published on Fri 7th Apr 2023. Featured in KBD #119.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial