Late December Casual Community Update

[LittleWalter]

@Luke We need a twitter-like feed of your shipping updates. Would probably answer most new questions very quickly haha

This is actually something I've been thinking about too to be honest. As much as I understand and appreciate the importance of updating people regularly, doing so on a per-person (almost) basis starts becoming pretty exhausting.

So, then, the question is: where is the right place for such a feed? main page? special 'update webpage'? the forums? twitter/mastodon?  - suggestions and alternative options very welcome (as always).

Heck, go with what's easiest to start. Twitter would likely work well, since Pine already utilizes it, and visitors don't have to have an account to see (most?) posts. (I have no idea how many tweets a guest to a twitter page can view before being blocked by a login/signup. I know I've seen it with trying to view a page's media posts. If they have some kind of pinning/sticky option, that should negate any concern over that.)

Keep in mind that not everyone uses social media, such as myself.  (Gave up most forms of social media long ago, and even borderline ones like reddit, I'm done w/ all of it going forward.)

I'd recommend just doing it mostly on your own Pine64 properties to avoid confusion in the long run, but that's just my opinion.

Exactly, I second that reminder. I have zero social media as well, and many times avoid to even allow their javascript in my browser. The pine forum should be fine. I'm sure you guys can implement something that works great.

It's more work but a simple Django page (or—gasp!—php page) w/ whatever DB backend should be relatively easy to write is what I would think.  But the forum should be fine since that's obviously more work.  But if Twitter is going to be used, have it be a redundancy because I probably won't see it.  I will read or lurk on a Twitter feed or a reddit thread found via a search engine but it's not a guarantee someone like me would see it.

Haven't gotten so extreme to block JS from running entirely but I've gotten tired of the advertisement-run online surveillance companies like Facebook and Google/Alphabet.  Heck, I can't be the only one around these particular parts—it's a small part of the appeal of running Linux-based machines!