Refactoring DLTJ, Winter 2021 Part 4: Thursday Threads Newsletter Launches

Refactoring DLTJ, Winter 2021 Part 4: Thursday Threads Newsletter Launches

Success!
Four parts plus a half (or a «re-do»» of part 2):
Ramp up automation for adding reading sources to Obsidian
Refactor the process of building this static website on AWS
Fix the webmentions cache, an unanticipated diversion
Recreate the ability for readers to get updates by email
Turn the old DLTJ “Thursday Threads” concept into a newsletter (this post)
Earlier today, the newsletter launched with
issue 79
.
It wasn’t without hiccups, but I don’t think any of the problems leaked out to the subscribers.
I started with a list of 286 email addresses that were subscribed to the 2015 edition.
This morning I sent an email to all of them on the blind-carbon-copy line from my regular email.
That way I could see which addresses bounced back as undeliverable (94 addresses) before loading the list into the newsletter database.
(Undeliverable email counts as a strike against you when using Amazon’s Simple Email Service, so I didn’t want to start with a bad reputation with them.)
One of the issues I ran into was with the multiprocessing code that I found on the web.
It didn’t work as claimed, and when I tried to adjust it, the loop to process email stalled, so I ripped out that code.
In the end, with about 200 email addresses, it took just a minute or two of single-threaded, sequential sending to get them all out.
Perhaps I won’t need that multi-threaded capability until
Thursday Threads
gets much bigger.
How the Newsletter is Put Together
Like everything on this static site blog, an issue starts as a Markdown file.
Markdown is a light-weight markup language that translates very easily into HTML, and makes it easy for a writer to create valid HTML.
It is also possible to mix HTML inside a Markdown file and have the right thing happen.
The Jekyll processor (the program that turns a folder of Markdown files into a folder of HTML files) has a mechanism for including macros in the markup, and each «thread» in the issue is a macro file.
If you look at the
Markdown source for issue 79
, you’ll see each heading (marked with
##
) has a
{% include thursday-threads-quote.html %}
macro definition.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
{
% include thursday-threads-quote.html
blockquote
=
«The EDUCAUSE 2022 Top 10 IT Issues take an optimistic view of how technology can help make the higher education we deserve—through a shared transformational vision and strategy for the institution, a recognition of the need to place students’ success at the center, and a sustainable business model that has redefined ‘the campus.'»
url
=
«https://er.educause.edu/articles/2021/11/top-10-it-issues-2022-the-higher-education-we-deserve»
versiondate
=
«2021-11-12»
versionurl
=
«https://web.archive.org/20211127031010/https://er.educause.edu/articles/2021/11/top-10-it-issues-2022-the-higher-education-we-deserve»
anchor
=
«Top 10 IT Issues, 2022: The Higher Education We Deserve»
post
=
«, EDUCAUSE»
%}
Each of th…