That’s a few weeks now that we are getting organized better, with Xenor and Tysliu, on the preparation of this newsletter. The guys are now putting more attention to the news gathering and preformatting the yaml source file that I use to generate the letter and the website. After some time of practice, it is much better for me, as now I don’t spend 5 hours each sunday anymore and I can manage the publication process in less than 2 hours. I still gather some extra links after the editors push their contributions. Then I verify the links, the categories, edit the comments sometimes, add dots at the ends of line, such tiny things. A huge thanks to Xenor and Tysliu!

Now we have 1312 subscribers to the newsletter. Plus an unknown number of RSS subscribers, maybe around 200. We get 250 visits per day on the website (according to webalizer), and most of them come from rss readers of many sorts. As the mailchimp is still free until we reach 2000, there is some margin. When we reach 1600 I think I swill begin a cleaning campaign, to help people that actually don’t read the letter to unsubscribe. I kind of like the idea of throwing accounts away. Usually in web business, an account is an asset and they are never thrown away. There is so much to be told about numbers, and their reality, in our industry.

But the reality about numbers is usually the consequence of the over simplification required by marketeers. Things are never so simple as just a single number. The technicians among us are always in pain when we need to provide numbers, because they come with a strict definition of what they count, and that definition is never respected by the people that just want to use the number and put a sexy label on it. When we say ‘registered accounts’ they say ‘users’. Do you see the difference? Damn, I hate that system that forces salesmen to become a liars.