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Author Topic: Super-sized Newsletter for December 3rd, 2018 - Codename: Wedding Feathers  (Read 33674 times)

mouser

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BREAKING NEWS JAN 6, 2018 - Results of our Annual NANY (New Apps for the New Year) 2019 event are now posted: see here.



Super-sized Newsletter for December 3rd, 2018
"Codename: Wedding Feathers"




1. Newsletter Editorial

Hello and welcome to another edition of the DonationCoder newsletter! I'd like to briefly mention a few things before we get to the normal round-up of interesting posts on the forum.

First things first, I want to thank everyone for making our 2018 fundraiser, held in April and celebrating 13 years online, such a big success.  It's been a few years since we had a fundraiser, and I wasn't sure how it would go. In the end, we received over $13k in small donations from everyday users.  It was gratifying and humbling to see our hard work in building the new website honored with such generosity.  It made all the work feel worthwhile.  Thank you all, for not just your financial donations, but more importantly for your enthusiastic encouragement for the site and our non-traditional approach to things.  (If you missed the fundraiser, we would still appreciate your support -- just click the Donate button at the top of our web pages).

Second, I want to call your attention to the 11th annual NANY event on the site, and let you know about its upcoming deadline of January 1st to participate.  NANY stands for New Apps for the New Year, and it's where we invite coders who hang out on the site to release a new freeware application by the first day of the new year.  So if you are a coder, even just a beginner, you might consider taking the opportunity to participate.  There's nothing to win or lose, you just get a nice free mug for participating.  Even if you're not a coder, stop by the NANY 2019 section and try out some of the early releases and suggest ideas for last minute entries, and cheer on the coders who are participating.

Third, on a personal note, I got married since the last newsletter!  Thank you all for your good wishes and thoughts. I am by nature a very private person, but I wanted to share the experience with my extended family here, and I'm glad I did.  I even posted a couple of photos (see below).

Last, I wanted to give a special shout-out to a coder nicknamed "KodeZwerg" who has been programming up a storm on the Coding Snacks section of the forum lately.  His enthusiasm is contagious, and he's even been hanging out in the DonationCoder IRC chat room and making the place a bit more lively this holiday season.  So if you have an idea for a small program you'd like to see created, now might be a good time to visit the Coding Snacks section of the forum and make a request.  And if you find yourself bored at 2am just choose the Chat option from the Help menu on the website and join the late night crew for some meandering chit chat.

Signing off from Champaign, Illinois, USA,
-Jesse (mouser)



2. NANY 2019 - New Apps for the New Year - LESS THAN A MONTH LEFT TO PARTICIPATE

For the last 11 years on the DonationCoder.com site we run a friendly event called "NANY" (New Apps for the New Year), where we invite forum visitors to help us celebrate the new year by releasing a new freeware program on the first day of the new year.  We typically get a variety of entries -- some are genuinely useful tools designed to be shared widely, and some are programming exercises for new users.  All participants receive a free deluxe DonationCoder NANY Mug, and we may have some additional prizes donated by members.

If you are a coder you now have less than a month until the January 1, 2019 deadline to enter!



3. Mouser's Software Updates and Discussions

I've uploaded some updates to many of my large applications since the last newsletter.  As always, you can find the list of what's new both in the online help pages (linked from each program homepage) or in the forum thread about the application (also linked from each program homepage).  I've also released some new android apps and a bunch of miscellaneous updates.



4. Member Projects

We love to keep up with projects that our members are working on, and hearing what our forum members think of software they use.  If you're working on something interesting -- let us know!  And don't forget to check out the NANY section above, it's got tons of new software releases by members.



5. User-to-User: Your Input Requested

We 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.



6. Coding Snacks

The Coding Snacks Section is where people can request small utilities be coded while they wait.



7. Website Discoveries, Debates, Essays, Discussions, and Humor

What'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.



8. Fun, Humor, and Entertainment

Some entertaining diversions.



9. Software Discussions

Some noteworthy software discussions on the forum since the last newsletter.



10. Developer's Corner

This section highlights some discussions that might be relevant for not just coders and developers, but also people interested in entrepreneurial issues.


« Last Edit: January 06, 2019, 09:32 AM by mouser »

KodeZwerg

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So if you have an idea for a small program you'd like to see coded, now might be a good time to visit the Coding Snacks section of the forum and make a request.  And if you find yourself bored at 2am just choose the Chat option from the Help menu on the website and join the late night crew for some meandering chit chat.

Thanks for the flowers and I highly second that, true  :-* :-* :-*

Great Newsletter  :Thmbsup:, thats my todays bedtime story  :P

rgdot

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Gmail marking it as spam  :down:

mouser

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Booo

KynloStephen66515

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Gmail marking it as spam  :down:

GMail account here - not marked as spam.

mouser

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If you are a gmail user and received it marked as spam, be sure to mark it as NOT spam.. maybe if enough do that, gmail will change the way it's classified in the future.

wraith808

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Gmail marking it as spam  :down:

GMail account here - not marked as spam.

Same here.  Not marked as spam.

rgdot

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If you are a gmail user and received it marked as spam, be sure to mark it as NOT spam.. maybe if enough do that, gmail will change the way it's classified in the future.

Did that, good to see others are not experiencing same

erikts

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Gmail marking it as spam  :down:

GMail account here - not marked as spam.

Same here.  Not marked as spam.

GMail account here - not marked as spam but I have manager-newsletter (at) donationcoder.com in my contact.

mouser

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By the way -- I feel weird commandeering the newsletter for my own personal life events.. But I wouldn't feel so strange if we regularly included such updates for all members here.. So don't hesitate to share more of your personal life on the forum so we can all cheer with you through the good times and lend a supportive shoulder to lean on during the hard times.

mouser

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One last thing.. It really is nice to see replies to the newsletters, and get some encouragement about them.  For whatever reason, it's not my favorite thing to do so every bit of positive reinforcement helps!

mouser

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ps. If you're not signed up to receive the newsletter by mail, you can sign up here: https://www.donation...ditorials/newsletter

tomos

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One last thing.. It really is nice to see replies to the newsletters, and get some encouragement about them.  For whatever reason, it's not my favorite thing to do so every bit of positive reinforcement helps!
well it is great to get the overview :up:

I was wondering: do you sit down at some stage and start trawling dc to find relevant threads, or do you keep an ongoing record of possible candidate threads between newsletters?
Tom

Jay_H

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Well, better late than never (most of the time).
Congratulations to both of you on your marriage! I wish you the best life has to offer.
Mouser, you are incredible! Thank you for sharing your programming genius with us mortals.

Sincerely,
Jay_H

mouser

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I was wondering: do you sit down at some stage and start trawling dc to find relevant threads, or do you keep an ongoing record of possible candidate threads between newsletters?

I wrote a script that shows me all new posts in each forum section since the last newsletter, in a format suitable for copy+paste into newsletter, but there is still a lot of manual labor involved in checking links, pruning, reorganizing them into appropriate newsletter sections, etc.

KodeZwerg

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the newsletter looks super-heavy with mega much love created.
i am still not done reading half of it, so much "read here" and "go on there" possibilities.

Tanks for collecting and formatting all that into a usable reading variant!