The name.pn newsletter - July 2023

Dear name.pn friend,

Welcome back to the name.pn newsletter! It's been a while. Almost two years, I'm told. 😳

You might have noticed we're using a new email service called Buttondown. Mailchimp turned out to be too expensive and it wasn't really "us" anyway. Buttondown is now fully integrated into name.pn so you can subscribe and unsubscribe right from inside name.pn like you could with the old mailing list.

Over 2000 users - thank you! 🎉

At the time of writing, name.pn has 2259 users, of which 1936 of you have completed your profiles to the point where they can be shared!

Thank you so much for being early adopters of this tech! It's still just a tiny little side project with only one permanent person working maybe 2 days a month, and there has been no marketing done - all of you found this place through word of mouth.

Where have you seen name.pn being used? Is your workplace or society starting to integrate it into its own inclusivity policies? I'd love to hear stories about where name.pn is being used - please reply to this email if you have them!

Please continue to spread the word about name.pn - without your support and enthusiasm, this place would literally be nothing.

New features 📣

Lots has been added to name.pn in the last two years, but here are some of my personal highlights:

• Name variants: You can now add variants of your name to your profile and say whether you like being called by them. Maybe your name is David but you hate people calling you "Dave"? Maybe you have a new name you'd love people to try on for size? Now you can tell people through your profile.

• Pronoun ordering: If you have multiple pronouns, did you know you can reorder them by dragging and dropping on your profile? If "they/them" works for you but you prefer "fae/faer", this feature is for you.

• Pronounless profiles: Some people genuinely don't have pronouns, or they're still working out which pronouns work best. If this is you, you can now indicate that you want people to only use your name and not pronouns. And if you are happy with any pronouns at all, you can say that too - we'll generate random usage examples for you!

• Audio finally working on Apple! The record/playback features of name.pn are its most complicated feature and I don't have Apple devices at home so this was a challenge to fix. I did a ground-up rewrite of the audio infrastructure and I'm happy to report that Apple device users can now record your pronunciation and play other people's. Phew! 😅

• rel="me": Many of us have moved our social media lives to Mastodon (give me a follow if you like) and its link verification service is very cool - if you link to your Mastodon profile from your name.pn page, and then link back to your name.pn page from your Mastodon profile, you'll get your green "verified" tick, to indicate the two pages are owned by the same person. This is all done through the rel="me" microformat which is prevalent on Mastodon but will hopefully be rolled out to other kinds of social media in the future. When it is, name.pn will support it!

Did you know we work in the open? The name.pn roadmap is publicly available, so you can see what we have planned and what we're working on now.

Why use your personal email address 📬

If you've looked at the signup form recently you'll notice we now encourage you to use your personal email address to sign up for name.pn, rather than one given to you by your employer or institution.

Your name.pn profile is about your name, which belongs to you and not your employer. We want to make sure you can take your profile with you when you move to a new employer and this will be harder if you use a work email address (for example, where will the "forgot password" emails go?).

You can read our privacy policy to see how we use your data - we don't share your email address with other people and we only use it to provide services to you (and optionally this newsletter if you opt into it, of course!)

If you'd like to switch your profile to your personal email address (thinking about switching jobs? I won't tell!), head on over to your account page or drop me a line, by replying to this email or contacting me in other ways.

Are your pronouns here? 🤵🏾

Do you know about Gender Census? I take part in Cassian's survey every year and look for the results with extreme interest - it's the best source of data about the non-binary community there is.

After looking at this year's results, I noticed the rise in popularity of a pronoun set star/stars that name.pn didn't support, which I quickly added!

But your pronouns might not be here. If you use pronouns that aren't available in the app, please let me know by replying to this email or raising an issue! It's relatively easy to add them (OK, there are some that it's not but I'll tell you why and prioritize fixing it if they're yours!)

Getting involved 🥼

name.pn is currently mostly just my work (hi, it's Quinn here!) and I only get about 2 days a month to work on it. 😔

But it's open source! That means the work happens in the open and is welcoming to contributions from the community. I'd love contributions from people who can see how it could be improved:

• Report bugs & issues, or suggest new features

• Check out our roadmap to see what we're working on now and next

• Or if you're interested in spinning up your own copy and making changes, it's a Dockerized Rails app and all the source code is here.

Or just reply to this email for a conversation about your ideas. I love hearing from users, and name.pn is all about you.

OK, that's plenty for now. Thank you so much for being a name.pn user and for reading this. Hopefully I'll see you in less than 2 years next time!

name.pn is an open source product created by Quinn Daley (they/them). You're likely receiving this because you opted into receiving it - you can always change your preferences on your name.pn account page or using the links below.

It's all about the infinitely variable ways people use their names and pronouns in the real world, which means it's about you: if it doesn't do what you want it to do, please do take a look at the roadmap or raise an issue. The more I know about how people use their names and pronouns, the better I can make this tool.