Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial
Behind the Scenes of Issue 57
A plethora of new splits, I've lost 65% of my donors, list vendors by country, upcoming newsletter cleanup, etc.
Published December 20, 2021
There were a lot of new designs published this week and also some interesting posts with tips or strange observations. In addition, I made some cool discoveries digging for info about the vintage boards included in this issue.
Support
It seems I've lost 65% of my regular donors in the past two weeks – due to the Buymeacoffee/PayPal wrangling.
Thanks to all the awesome people who resubscribed as paid members to keep an otherwise free "service(?)" alive.
By the way, 40,000 readers check by in a month, still the support of only 5-10 donors makes running this show possible.
So don't hesitate to throw some bucks at me: https://kbd.news/donate
Even the smallest donation counts, but the real key of sustainability is regular donation (i.e. paid subscribers).
Quick news
On another note, let's start with some posts that didn't make it to this issue but are worth mentioning:
- Caps Unlocked entered insolvency and ceased trading.
- The Keyboard Advent Calendar of the Japanese MK community keeps churning out interesting articles (use Google Translate).
- And a reaction to the Solovan, a keyboard without alphas, won my imaginary "Comment of the Week" prize:
I guess logically, there's a niche in the market for a keyboard without alphas. The alphas and mods are the last part of a traditional 100% that haven't been isolated for complete removal, probably because of how impractical it makes the resulting product as a solo keeb. […] – r/redlion145.
Vendor database update – now by country
I haven't updated (or checked) my keyboard vendor database for a long time.
But this week I needed a list of shops in a specific country and realized the filter options are for regions only.
So I made a separate page with all the countries occurring in the database and this interface is public now:
https://kbd.news/keyboard-vendors-by-country/
The URLs are quite descriptive so you can use that too when looking for or referencing these lists:
https://kbd.news/keyboard-vendors/Japan
Newsletter cleanup
Last week, the newsletter was sent to 1595 readers and with the new subscribers the list passed the 1600 mark. I'm approaching 2000 subscribers, the upper limit of MailChimp's free plan, when sending out the newsletter will start to cost me real money.
But before that, I will clean the database and remove inactive subscribers in an effort to push back the day of reckoning:
So if you are a subscriber and want to keep receiving these newsletters, make sure you click a link (any link) in the email every now and then. This way I can see that you are still alive and with us.
Split database update
I keep tagging and updating the split database.
There's still a backlog of about 50 models – and new designs keep emerging in the meantime – but I'll get there eventually…
Mailbox
The Jawn FE from Keeb.io & TheBoard is already on my desk. It's a really nice little macropad, but I couldn't take proper photos due to the lack of proper natural light – awful winter days.
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Well, that's it for now I think.
Thanks for reading. Keep learning and building – and check the posts! Cheers, Tamás
Published on Mon 20th Dec 2021. Featured in KBD #57.
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