I’ve been writing a weekly newsletter on Linux & open source technologies for nearly 2 years now at cron.weekly and to this day I’m amazed by all the feedback and response I’ve gotten from it. What’s even more fun is watching the subscriber base grow on a weekly basis, to over 6.000 users already!

(That initial big spike is actually from when I imported the MailChimp list into a self-hosted Sendy installation)

At every issue there’s good feedback on the projects I list, comments on the stories, … it’s so much fun!

But there’s a downside …

Taking cron.weekly to the next level

All that feedback has been directed at me. I’ve been mailing thousands of Linux enthousiasts every week and it’s been one-way communication. I talk, they listen. That seems like a waste of potential.

Imagine if every one on that newsletter could share their knowledge and expertise and connect to one another? I’m definitely not the smartest person to be mailing them all, there are far more intelligent folks subscribed. I want to get them involved!

To start building a community around cron.weekly I’ve launched the cron.weekly forum. Yes, there are things like Reddit, Stack Overflow, Quora, … and all other fun places to discuss topics. But there’s one thing they don’t have; the like minded people that subscribe to cron.weekly that each have the same interest at heart: caring about Linux, open source & web technologies.

Launching the forum is an experiment, there’s already so many places out there to “waste your time” online, but I’m confident it can become an interactive place to discuss new technologies, share ideas or launch new open source projects.

Heck, there already interesting topics on load balancing features & requirements, end-to-end encrypted backups, new open source projects like git-dit, …

Highlighting questions

If questions posted to the forum remain unanswered, I’ll call upon the great powers of cron.weekly subscribers to highlight them and raise awareness, get more eyes on the topic & find the best answer possible.

The last cron.weekly issue #88 already had a “Ask cron.weekly” section to get that started.

I’m confident about the future of that forum, I think the newsletter can be a great way to get more attention to difficult-to-solve questions and allow cron.weekly to actively help its community members.

How can you help?

• Promote the cron.weekly newsletter to your friends, family & pets
• If you’ve got a problem, try asking on the cron.weekly forum
• If you started a new open source projected or reached a new milestone, brag about it in the “Show CW” section

Now let’s build a community together. :-) ⁽¹⁾

^{(1) I know, it’s cheesy – but I had to end my post with something, right?}