Load Balancing with HAProxy
serversforhackers.com
serversforhackers.com
I assume you're trying to build a readership. Have you considered curating links to supplement your writing? I recently subscribed to Pycoder's Weekly [0] and really enjoy the curated content they sent out every week. They have a big user base, too, and have been able to monetize it with job postings. It seems like you're in a complementary niche and could probably apply many of the same principles.
What I've found is that I skip over the long list of links, thinking I'll get to them later. However, I never do! I wanted to make this one have fewer topics, but get more in depth with them.
If you are deploying HAProxy, you'll google for tutorials about installing it. But is you're not deploying HAProxy, why would you read a long email about it? In the case of receiving an email at random time on a Monday, wouldn't you prefer it contain a list of links for you to skim, and if you so choose, a longer article on the intricacies of setting up long form content?
Look at it this way: 100% of weeks, I'm interested in receiving links. It's a much lower percentage of weeks that I'm interested in reading a long form tutorial. Of course, during those weeks, it's great to have. But I think you risk losing a lot of interested readers by focusing only on long form content.
My advice: stick to the tutorials as a feature of each week's email (but no big deal if you miss one!), and fall back on a set of 5-10 interesting links. This way you will retain more readers and also reduce the pressure on yourself to write a long article every week.
Suggestions:
As I have installed HAProxy in a Docker container, I noticed that the dependencies for `sudo add-apt-repository` are quite numerous. Instead I created a new sources.list and added the signing key manually.
Since you use SSL, a nice addition to your configuration is to redirect non-ssl trafic:
redirect scheme https code 301 if !{ ssl_fc }
Finally I had to try a few different ways to get my certificate and key to work with HAProxy. The order in my case was certificate, private key, intermediate, root ca (concatenated in a single file).