At the End of June, 2013, I started a new project called Web Development Reading List (WDRL). It was the logical evolvement of my weekly blog posts containing interesting links of our industry. When I started the newsletter, after just two weeks it already got 100 subscribers, not counting the people reading the online archive.

It grew and outgrew…

Now, four months later, I have over 500 subscribers who receive and enjoy my weekly link lists. This is amazing but I wasn't satisfied with the current workflow and solutions. Until this week, users had only the option to get an email or read online but there had been no RSS feed. Also, I wanted to give people the ability to propose links to WDRL. As I used plain static hand-written HTML before, all this wasn't possible in an easy way. I also needed to write the draft in TinyLetter and then copy/paste everything over to my online archive manually. The project was growing constantly and I needed to give it a proper environment again…

What Changed

This weekend I drastically changed the workflow. I now use Jekyll to build the still static HTML site which now has templates, which now has an RSS feed, and which now has a submission form. The latter is powered by free Wufoo so after 100 entries per month it will be blocked. This is okay for me as 100 external links are quite enough to handle for me.

And finally, the project now lives on its own place: wdrl.info.

Support and a big Thank You

The project is and will be free forever although I am thinking of how to finance all the time I am spending on the project (roughly 8-10hrs per issue). As I don't like ads too much and am fan of keeping everything open, as a first step I enabled GitTip. That means you can donate for WDRL if you want to.

But the best thing is: This project started as a small personal list and grew so much in just a few months that I just want to thank you for all your support and that you enjoy reading the list. You are awesome! ♥

-Anselm