Behind the Scenes of Issue 62

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 62

Issue #61 follow-up, vendor database updates, MoErgo, Videoton terminal progress, etc.

dovenyi
Published January 24, 2022

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

Hello everyone,

Issue #61 follow-up

The r/mk post gained a humiliating 18 upvotes in 24 hours while at the same time Cloudsource registered all-time record daily visitor numbers. It seems the audience is shifting. :D

Today's newsletter will be sent out to more than 1700 subscribers. Those who run a newsletter – at least at MailChimp – may be aware that there are different metrics to measure the size of audience: e.g. contacts and subscribers are two totally different parameters.

The number of contacts is limited to 2,000 in MailChimp's free plan and it's about 1,900 righ now so I'll have to delete some inactive subscribers to postpone the judgement day – when I'll have to pay for sending you these free weekly emails.

Donations: Thanks to Matt Osius and MoErgo's Stephen Cheng for their donations.

Sniffing vs reader suggested content

Sniffing for relevant content takes an insane amount of time. The last time I counted the number of posts on r/mk there were about 2000 to 3000 of them – a single week. And I dig through that mess to find a handful of valuable posts day by day…

I'm totally lost on Discord, GH isn't the optimal format to spot novelties either, and I'm not able to monitor the numerous local communities.

That's why I'm particularly grateful when readers reach out to me suggesting topics. So thanks a lot to April_mood and Art_Gabriel.

And ofc thanks to the proactive or responsive vendors too who help to keep the keyboard vendor database up to date.

Vendor database

cerakey.com added and contacted – waiting for more details.
fruitykeeb is back (formerly marked as closed).
It was high time to add Work Louder. Their keycaps are used on several boards nowadays.
dinokeys is closing…

MoErgo & Glove80

I've been following the MoErgo project since Stephen posted about the cylindrical MBK-like keycap profile designed specifically with this – then in development – split ergo in mind.

After 500+ iterations and a lot of work, the Kickstarter campaign starts tomorrow.

In addition, while I don't usually endorse kickstarters and group buys, MoErgo donated to kbd.news a visible amount of money so as a thank you there will be some links and references to moergo.com for a few weeks.

Videoton terminal progress

This was my most disgusting keyboard cleaning endeavor ever. The whole thing ended up in the shower…

I hate to post dirty keyboards but I'm pretty proud of how cleaning the plate came out:

Perfect cleaning would require desoldering all the switches – no thanks.

But at least you can see the Micro USA switches with the stem tops at an angle.

–-

Well, that's it for today.

Thanks for reading and thanks for your support.

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

Cheers, Tamás

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Published on Mon 24th Jan 2022. Featured in KBD #62.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial