Newsletter for December 19, 2011
"Codename: Snowy Feathers"
1. Newsletter EditorialGreetings and happy holidays! It's 45 degrees here in Illinois as I write this -- a mild winter so far. Personally I prefer to see a little snow on the ground in December. There are about 12 days left until the new year (it takes 48 hours to send out the newsletter to all of you so your mileage may vary). And that means less than 12 days until our year-end NANY event: New Apps for the New Year 2012.
You should know about NANY by now -- it's where we ask the coders of all skill levels who hang out on our site to try to release a new program to celebrate the upcoming year. Some of the programs are just experiments, some are large full-featured applications. The event is open to all coders, and there is no winner -- everyone who participates gets a coffee mug featuring our mascot Cody. If you're a coder, or you know someone who is, there's still plenty of time to take part -- just drop by our forum and announce your intent to do so.
And please do join us on New Years to cheer on all of the participants!
2. NANY UPDATESThere have been quite a few new NANY updates and releases in the last couple of weeks, including a big one by me. And probably a few more to come in the final days. Take a few moments to browse some of the entries and offer some constructive suggestions to the coders.
3. DonationCoder Software Updates and DiscussionsI hope you'll allow me the indulgence of talking a bit more about the substantial new application that I released as my NANY entry. Web Link Captor will be publicly available on January 1st, but it already has a home page and a video overview, and anyone who wants to get early access can simply send me a message on the forum. Web Link Captor takes a list of plaintext items, and builds an output document containing a list of url-linked results based on web searches for the items. It's a way to quickly build a clickable list of items from just their names, suitable for posting on your blog or a forum, etc.
4. User-to-User: Your Input RequestedWe love nothing more than having interesting discussions on our forum -- and we love when new people participate in the discussions. In each newsletter we try to highlight a few topics that we think might interest casual readers and that are good candidates for making your first post.
5. Mini-Reviews, Coding Snacks, and other DC Member Software ThreadsThe Coding Snacks section is one of the things that people love the most about DonationCoder -- it's where anyone can post a request for a custom piece of software -- and often find the requests granted overnight as one of the coders who inhabit our forum writes it as a free utility (lately DC member Skwire has been running circles around the rest of us, coding requests faster than lightning!)
6. Fun, Humor, and Amusements on the WebYou've made it half way through the newsletter, so let's have a break. Go make yourself an egg cream soda, and check out these fun websites and videos!
7. General Software DiscussionAlmost half the posts on the DC forum take the form of general software discussions, questions, recommendations, etc. These posts wind up in the General Software Discussion section and make it one of the most active sections of the DC forum. This is a great resource if you're trying to solve a software or hardware-related problem. We get so much traffic on this board that we split the recent content into two sections in the newsletter - general software and specific software discussions.
8. Specific Software DiscussionThis section of the newsletter draws attention to some of the standout discussions about specific programs that have been started since the last newsletter.
9. Developer's CornerThe title of this section shouldn't scare you off - there is definitely something of interest for everyone here! It's more than just a section for the discussion of software development, it's also where we discuss web design, entrepreneurial ideas, and general productivity issues. It's great to see that the section has been pretty active recently.
10. Website Discoveries, Debates, and DiscussionsWhat's new in cyberspace? What exciting new sites have been discovered by forum members? What's the current hot topic and debate? Read on to find out...
