Weekly Robotics
Couple of weeks ago I started working on a side project WeeklyRobotics. In this post I’m describing the project in detail and discuss how it’s been working so far.
Goal
My goal for WeeklyRobotics is for it to be a robotics content aggregator, where I handpick ~7 Robotics related links every week. The links that I pick are chosen very subjectively. For technical links I make sure there is quality information available, or at least some other reference where a reader can broaden his or her knowledge.
Each issue I try to include the following:
- Careers section
- Publication/Scientific paper
- Drones related post
- ROS/ROS2 related post
- Space related post
- Safety engineering related post
Those guidelines are very far from being fixed and I’m quite flexible about them. In general I want everyone to be able to find something interesting on Weekly Robotics.
The looks
When it comes to the design I had only one requirement - the layout should be as clear as possible. That means the core of each issue will be the text block. There won’t be any images or videos attached in the body of the post. The only image I might add to an issue is a header image that will have a fixed format and will have similar structure for each post.
User base
Since the issue #1, according to Google analytics, the site was visited by 1.5k users, with over 2k sessions.
I also added a newsletter for distributing the issues as a newsletter. At the time of writing I had 146 subscribers. Also Feedly tells me there 13 followers of my RSS feed.
The main way I try to grow the user base right now is through Reddit and Linkedin. Reddit proved to be a great platform to find first readers and get feedback from them. I’ve been posting links to WeeklyRobotics since issue #1 and the upvotes distribution is as follows:
| Issue | Upvotes | Views | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 102 | 3.1k | Self-post |
| 2 | 42 | 1.7k | |
| 3 | 18 | 1.2k | |
| 4 | 10 | 821 | |
| 5 | 33 | 1.6k | Added careers section |
| 6 | 4 | 537 | |
| 7 | 5 | 191 | After 8 hours |
I have no idea what counts as views at reddit. I cannot come up with any conclusion by correlating the reddit data with Google analytics data.
What’s next
I will keep working on Weekly Robotics and hopefully see it grow organically, while keeping in mind that it’s not the highest priority at this time. There are some huge news coming soon from me, stay tuned for more information!
