Noted Updates 1-3-2023

What a year! 2022 has come and gone and we wish you all a Happy New year and a blessed 2023 as we roll right into it at full speed.

We have many new changes this year and most were made in the last week or two as our family battled with the Covid virus. We are better now but while I was sick I had too much time to think and dream up new ideas, so let's get right into it.

Hows the discovery going?

Traffic is picking up and people are discovering Noted organically in droves. Cloudflare is saving us 576.65 GB of bandwidth this month!

Hosted - New Forum

I created a new forum called Hosted! It's ran on a popular self hosted forum software called Flarum and is very customizable. But why a forum you ask? Good question!

The simple answer is for control. For too long corporate companies have had control of our data. I’m not the protesting type but this is one thing that I hold fast on. Running a self hosted forum allows us to have control of our content. You can delete your profile at any time and it will never be seen again if you so wish.

This forum is ran on Proxmox and is backed up 3 times a week to a PBS server in my home. So rest assured our data is safe and will only disappear if the content creator wishes.

Join us on the Hosted forum and share your ideas. We encourage everyone to engage in discussions and join in on the fun!

Noted has a new Comment system!

Yep, I changed the comment system once again. This was for a good cause. I was using Commento which is very good but it required another docker container and DB to worry about.

The new comment system is baked into the site. All you have to do is signup to comment. It doesn't track anything from users like IP, location etc. It's 100% anonymous. 😊 If you are not registered, you can still see the comments but you will need to register to comment. This helps us fight that spam! 👍 And that brings me to the final announcement...

Noted Subscription/Membership

This one took a while to decide because I always wanted to keep Noted free for everyone. And it still is. The new subscription is only for those who want to support the site and help us give back to FOSS developers. ❤️ I've been emailed quite a few times from people asking how they can donate. So I spent some time thinking about it and came up with a plan that can help FOSS developers in the process. Some things you need to know about the subscriptions...

Subscribing is the same as registering

There will always be a free option. The free tier gives you access to our email newsletter and the ability to comment on the articles. If you subscribe, you will not get emailed for every article. We will email important news and our Weekly Roundup. Other articles will be simply posted without being sent to email. We don't want to overwhelm our readers with emails as we continue to curate more and more content daily.

The Supporter tier gives you access to special membership posts, newsletter and comments. It's mostly just there for people who want to donate and give back to FOSS developers. There will very rarely be content that will be for Supporters only, however, that could change in the near future.

You can always choose to become a Supporter later at any time and upgrade your account. When logged in, just go to your account page.

To change your avatar tied to your email, register at Gravatar.com and upload an avatar there! 🚀

Newsletter migration Changes

If you previously subscribed to Noted newsletter through our older Mailchimp link, keep a note that we will be migrating the emails from Mailchimp into our new system. You may see an email soon to confirm a new account.

As the Noted audience grows, our newsletter is growing and our capacity for Mailchimp is running thin. So this is a good move for us as we continue to grow to move away from Mailchip because it is a pretty large expense just to let you know what's new on Noted.

Final Notes and Thoughts

We look forward to your feedback as we roll into the New Year. We are still on Discord too so join us over there for live discussion about self hosted shenanigans.

Our goal is to keep the content pouring in to feed your addiction! Help us do that by submitting ideas on the forum or Discord. We'd like to curate 3-5 articles per week eventually so your ideas are wanted more than you know!

Thank you for a fantastic 2022 and we hope you continue to enjoy the content on Noted to come in 2023!