Bytes

So here is my curated list of (mostly) curated newsletters. I’ve enjoyed all of these, and if you’re subscribed to Hacker Newsletter I think you’ll find many of these useful as well. I will update this list as I discover others.

Favorites

• Now I Know is one I’ve mentioned several times before. Dan Lewis does an awesome job of coming up with interesting content every single day. If you’re not one of the 100,000+ people already subscribed, you should check it out.
• Dave Pell’s NextDraft seems to be a favorite for many. He covers a range of topics every weekday, and does so with enough humor to make news actually fun to read.
• Practicing Ruby is a paid newsletter, so that makes it different than all the others listed here. However, if you do anything Ruby related I don’t think this one is even optional - it is that good. It would be great to see this much passion poured into other topics. Check out an article to see what I mean.
• Each day, a random subscriber from The List Serve is allowed to send out whatever they want to the 25k subscribers. To answer what you’r e thinking - yes, it provides for some crazy talk, but the great reads easy make up for it. I love ideas like this!
• Links I Love is a monthly newsletter that you’ll wish was weekly. You can sign-up here. Jodi does a great job curating articles that you won’t find elsewhere.
• Uncommon asks when was the last time you stopped amidst a sea of ’likes’? It is something totally different and one that I think you’ll enjoy.
• Scott Hanselman’s Newsletter of Wonderful Things, which is like Hacker Newsletter minus Hacker News.
• Brain Pickings is probably one of the better known curated newsletters. Like ‘Now I Know’, you’re always going to learn something new each week with this one.
• Longreads - five great looooooooooong reads every week. A great and simple design make is even better (and gives you more time to read them).

Non-tech News

• Muck Rack Daily
• The Brief

Startup

• Term Sheet - probably one of the ugliest sign-up forms ever, but Dan Primack of Fortune does a great job covering all the VC, IPO, and exit deals going on.
• Launch
• Startup Textbook
• Startup Digest
• Startup Reading List Startup Digest (okay, that is a tongue twister)
• Founder Weekly
• Startup Frontier
• Startup Edition
• Biz Dev Newsletter

Mobile

• Android Weekly
• iOS Dev Weekly
• Blackberry Weekly

Programming / General Technology

• Devops Weekly
• Status Code
• Hacker Talks
• Coder Weekly
• Software Lead Weekly
• 3d Printing Letter
• Security Letter
• Co-working Weekly

Programming Digests

The weekly digest format for various programming languages and technologies has been hot. It seems like every week there is a new one, so this probably only covers the more popular ones. These are great resources to stay on top of a particular topic through curated experts. I have some favorites here, but sorted alphabetically since there are so many!

In the last two years I’ve tested a lot of things on the landing page for Hacker Newsletter. While I found some small wins, overall it hasn’t amounted to much in terms of increasing my conversion rating. The most important observation has been that the source of traffic makes the biggest difference in the conversion rate, and more specifically - if a visitor is already subscribed to another newsletter, they are around two times more likely to sign-up. So with this is mind, one way to grow your list is to leverage swapping mentions with other newsletters to focus on these high converting users or look into other ways to target those users.

Update update: This is really old, and nothing still applies here.

Update: A week later and MailChimp has fixed this by allowing you to turn off the chiclet feature… they are some fast chimps! So with that said this article will only apply to anyone who has left their privacy setting to “public”, which would most likely be any newsletter that already exists as of 4/1/11.

Did you know that the Ted newsletter has over a half million subscribers? I find that impressive especially after starting my own newsletter, Hacker Newsletter, and seeing just how tough it is to get subscribers. Every week I get feedback on how great and useful my newsletter is and always see +50% open rates, but penetrating inboxes is a lot harder than I had imagined (but a fun challenge!). I started wondering how other newsletters were doing and although some publish there subscriber counts most don’t. It just took me a minute to realize that if they were using MailChimp like I am, all I would need to figure out is how the subscriber count javascript chicklet that MailChimp provides works.

This is the results of asking my great Hacker Newsletter subscribers what they are currently reading. I thought this experiment went very well and I found several books that I've added to my queue, including several that I hadn't seen before as well as many I had wanted to read, but had forgotten about.

I finally finished what I had wanted to do several years ago when I first read about jekyll, a ruby static site generator created by Tom Preston-Werner (Cofounder of GitHub). The delay was mainly from just not using my site, but then I realized that was probably because it was such a pain to post something on my old WordPress site.

So here it is with a new design and no comments. I’m keeping everything simple and really focusing on just content this time around. I’m not even importing over all my previous posts, but rather just the few that still get some traffic as of today.

Although rare, sometimes a Windows Service can hang while stopping or restarting. This happened to me yesterday on one of my SharePoint servers and thought I would write-up a quick note in case I ever need it again. In my case the Office SharePoint Search Service had stopped responding and when I tried to restart the service it hung on “STOPPING”. A reboot would of fixed it, but that isn’t an option for a production server usually.

Recently Jeremy Thake asked why SharePoint Share (which I introduced a week ago)?

jthake @sharepointshare why should we use this over using diigo or del.icio.us? take a read of http://bit.ly/7ZG07 interested in ur thoughts

It is a great question and one that I thought about before creating SharePoint Share. As Jermey and Joel point out, there are several avenues to share information, so why create another? I found myself frustrated by my current SharePoint RSS feeds was the main reason. I will go into that in a minute, but first thought I would summarize the issues I see in SharePoint information I consume from the web (which I am sure is not unique to SharePoint): trending topics, personal, local, fire hose, cryptic, and lastly the barrier to entry.

After reading Joel’s 101+ SharePoint Twitter Users and being disappointed that there wasn’t links I wrote a little Ruby script to generate a new list with links.

I was downloading the VMware player today and noticed this agreement just to download the logo to link back to their site. How does stuff like this happen?

• You may only display the VMware Player icon on your Web site as designated herein, and not in any other manner. It is your responsibility to ensure that the link is always an active link to the VMware Player product page or the VMware Player download page or such other successor VMware website.
• The VMware Player icon must appear by itself on your web page and in accordance with the minimum spacing (the height of the Web icon) between each side of the icon.
• You may not alter the VMware Player icon in any manner, including, but not limited to, size, proportions, colors, elements or otherwise distort its perspective or appearance.
• You may not link to vmware.com from a Web site that is obscene or pornographic, or disparaging, defamatory, or libelous to VMware or any of its products.
• Your use may not directly or indirectly imply VMware’s sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of your product or service or present misleading information about VMware products or services.
• Your use may not infringe any VMware intellectual property or other rights, may not violate any state or federal laws, and must comply with international IP laws.
• You may not frame VMware content.
• You may link to, but may not replicate, VMware content.
• Your reference to VMware, its products, and its Web site must comply with the general trademark guidelines as specified in the VMware Branding Guidelines.
• While you may use the Web icon as provided by these guidelines, you may not use the VMware corporate logo or any other VMware logo or graphic to link to VMware.com.
• These guidelines do not grant permission to use any other VMware logos or trademarks.
• VMware reserves the right in its sole discretion to terminate or modify your permission to display the VMware Player icon at any time.