We have a new home! Expect more frequent content and more of the nice and quirky newsletters!
Intermission
The why
Last year we were writing the TL;DR newsletter in a very nice trio using the substack platform. In a turn of events we found out that the platform was supporting neo-nazi propaganda by keeping newsletters up and running and even monetizing them!
As hate speech goes against our Code of Conduct continuing to use the platform created an ethical problem. To resolve that we wrapped the content for 2023 for the newsletter and went searching for another platform.
Combining ideas
At the same time two other things happened in parallel:
- Discussions about a blog for general posts from and to the community
- A Request For Comment (RFC) style proposals system for improvements
On the organizers group, we started discussing that it may be very nice and useful to have a blog to post the newsletter, as well as a way to send emails!!!
That also gives us a venue to post community content, from anyone that is interested in writing something cool and sharing that with others. Basically a more permanent and longer form version of the #show-and-tell channel on Slack.
The blog also opens up space to post reports and pictures of events that we run, along with summaries. Very old school and Indie Web style. (Keep an eye out for a webring haha)
Along side to that, the organizers group changed, we saw the departure of Jen Chan as the main organizer and the succession by Dann Toliver on that role. At the same time we saw an influx of people who were de facto organizers getting the title.
The change brought exciting new ideas and we wanted a way to organize and be more open for improving the community. Since we are very influenced by the engineering side of things (although it is changing), the best idea on how to implement “proposals for improving the community” was a RFC process.
To test out the proposals system, we thought it would be a good idea use the blog.
Building a blog
We decided to go with Astro for two reasons:
- It builds statically, so no JS on the client (ironic that we are Toronto… JS and try to get rid of JS) hehe.
- It has nice built in components, so we are not having to maintain the same lines of code.
What now?
The blog is live, welcome to it and enjoy!
Now we have an open place to share ideas and write articles. If you would be interested in doing so, please reach out to us on Slack!