30 November, 2016

Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.

I’m gonna level with you: I never really understood the point of people having
newsletters. For things—like CSS, JS, or performance—sure, but people having
them… it just never made sense to me.

That was until I spoke to David and
Sagi at Hacking UI.
I was on the Hacking UI podcast a few weeks ago and it was a tonne of fun. David
and Sagi are really great guys and we had a very enjoyable chat about many, many
different things, but one of my favourite parts was when they both passionately
extolled the virtues of having a mailing list. I was sold, and added it to my
to-do list.

Honestly, I would highly recommend listening to the
episode,
and keeping an eye on everything that the guys are up to. Some really insightful
stuff going down.

The Newsletter

The newsletter will provide a place for sharing any content that doesn’t fit
within the remit of a Tweet or a blog post. This means more curated and
exclusive content; it means more off-topic and obscure; it means more personable
and direct.

Sign up

Exclusive Content

I’ve always liked doing very low fidelity
screencasts. A part of me really
loves the idea of diving into a topic, throwing together a recording in one
take, doing no editing, and just slinging it on YouTube for free. I want to do a
lot more of these screencasts, and the newsletter will be a perfect way of
sharing them. Screencasts will appear in the newsletter first, and then will
probably hit Twitter a little while after.

I’ve already got a pretty neat performance screencast recorded for Issue #1.

Discounts

Events often give me promo codes to share with people. This usually gives
attendees 10–25% off of their ticket price. The newsletter will be a good place
for events to promote their, err, promotions, and for readers to get some
bargains.

Updates

I was literally asked this five days ago: I really want to come to your
performance workshop, do you have a mailing list so I can hear when you’re doing
it next?

Well, I do now!

Curation

I’ll recap and reshare any of my own articles in the newsletter, so it will act,
to some extent, as an RSS replacement. I will also occasionally dig into the
archives and post older CSS Wizardry content (provided it’s still relevant).

I’ll also share links to other articles and resources I’ve found. These could be
pretty off-topic, as I have a keen interest in the obscure. Anything that I’ve
found particularly interesting recently would be a candidate for inclusion, so
expect a lot of variety.

I’ll also share things like talks and technical blog posts that I’ve come
across, so there will be plenty of technical stuff in there.

Frequency

I’m not going to stick to a strict publishing schedule because I want to be as
informal as possible. I’ll share content as soon as I have something relevant to
say, but I will also keenly avoid overloading you. Expect infrequency.

For the longest time I have actively declined sponsored content requests on both
this site and my Twitter account: I respect you way too much to start spamming
you with ads. The newsletter, however, might be open to tasteful sponsorship,
job listings, product pitches, etc. It’s an avenue I’m certainly open to
exploring, but I’m keen to keep a close eye on relevance and quality.

If you have a product or service that you’d like to promote, get in
touch with me to discuss options.

Sound Okay?

Cool! Get yourself signed up below or directly on the
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site.