Behind the Scenes of Issue 65

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 65

40s Day, quick news, on cleaning up the subscriber database, lot of new vendors added.

dovenyi
Published February 14, 2022

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Hello friends,

I'm Tamas Dovenyi with Issue #65 of my DIY keyboard focused blog and newsletter dubbed the Keyboard Builders' Digest.

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40s Day

It turns out 40s Day is my Groundhog Day.

If you don't know what 40s day is, it's the day when small keyboards with 40%-ish layouts are celebrated – on the 40th day of the year which is Feb. 9.

(And if you don't know what Groundhog Day is, it's a cultic movie about an asshole weatherman (Bill Murray), a time loop, a fat groundhog and the meaning of life.)

I can clearly remember my surprise last year when small keyboard owners started to flood r/mk and kept doing it for a whole day. Yet, this year I was caught totally off guard again. :D I mean, I use a 46% layout too and while I'm not an advocate of any layout, I know full well that raising awareness for anything non-standard is important.

However, I can't see the point in posting hundreds of 40%s on Reddit on a single day – firstly, because they quickly disappear in the thread for most readers. And there are at least two things that bug me about the 40s dump in its current form: the majority of posts come without any specs – not even the name of the keyboard model. And instead of answering questions, Redditors who dare to ask questions are often ignored and/or downvoted. Most "contributors" don't even seem to take the minimal effort to check back after posting a low-effort single photo.

This hit-n-run flooding is controversial to say the least. What's this supposed to mean? What's the real purpose? Honestly, I don't know.

This was the general moaning part, but 40s day made my particular task of finding interesting keyboard projects especially harder too. This week, I'm not sure at all if I have managed to find every valuable post I'd usually bookmark and feature. Suspiciously, much of my posts this week were about vintage stuff and older projects rediscovered.

My takeaway: Next year I'll simply skip this day with regards to kbd.news. It's not really fun to browse through all the posts of r/mk on a "normal" day either, not to mention these "special days". :D I'm already scared of Valentine's Day…

Quick news

3DHubs is now Hubs, a Protolabs company.
OpenSCAD 3D rendering just got "an order of magnitude" faster (source).

Subscriber database clean-up

The time has come. I had to remove a few dozen inactive subscribers to make room for new ones and keep the number of "contacts" below 2000 – MailChimp's threshold of its free plan.

To make sure you remain on the list and continue receiving the weekly mails, all you have to do is to click a link in the email every now and then. No panic, you have to be inactive for months to be removed.

Opening rate is about 50% and click-through rate about 25% – which are way above industry averages btw.

"Normal" newsletters, living off advertisements or being run on similar business model, would probably aim for the larger number of subscribers without looking into their activity. However, I don't feel like paying for a service to be able to send out free stuff when half of the subscribers don't even open these mails.

Back in the days when this newsletter had only a few hundred subscribers, there were weeks with 40-50%+ clickthrough rates. On one hand, losing interest in kbd.news, keyboards in general or any hobby is natural and expected. But I try to postpone the day of reckoning anyway.

Vendor database update

Quite a lot of new vendors added: ergomech.store, Cyboard, wirekeebs.com, chosfox, Matias Store, Barbell Boards.

New acquisition

I bought another Datacoop only to get the contacts of the seller on an ebay-like local site. I already owned four of these vintage Hungarian optical keyboards made from the early '80s (I owe you a detailed write-up on them) but the seller has a lot more interesting stuff and now I'll able to negotiate directly. :D

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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 14th Feb 2022. Featured in KBD #65.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial