No More Newsletter
When I moved my blog to Glowbug, I envisioned an email newsletter automatically going out. I never got to an automatic email, it was a nightly (or morning) routine to send it out manually to my list of... four subscribers.
Each of them were personal friends who had signed up for this list years ago when it was something completely different. (Thanks to each of you, by the way.)
However, I am not dedicated with the blog to merit really continuing to push and try to make it a thing. So I'm officially pulling the plug on the blog's newsletter feature.
Maybe one day I'll start it back up, we'll see.
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New Newsletter Name
As has been an important highlight for the last few days, the newsletter I send out has been on my mind. Right now it has the self-titled subject of "Trick's Words." But I decided I wanted to give it a better name. I brainstormed on it a bit and came up with two ideas:
Bits & Blips
I like this one because it has the alliterative title. And Blips was one of the original things as I built this blog engine, I called entries blips. Because the original vision was to be entirely a link blog, so blips would encompass the short entries in the same way 'tweets' (and now 'toots' and 'skeets') are entering common language.
The Daily Trickster
Gives it more of a newspaper feel and it still incorporates my name while perhaps also allowing me license to have a bit more fun in the newsletter.
We'll see. Still mulling these over and how I feel.
Update: I've landed on calling the daily update emails 'Bits & Blips' moving forward.
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So apparently this blog's newsletter has been flagged and is under review for abusing the system. I'm fairly confident it will be cleared and something in how I generate it has gotten it flagged. It's not like this is a mass mailing, the newsletter subscribers are still in the single digits.
It might be the final straw which forces me off tinyletter though. I've been planning to move to a new platform for the newsletter, but I just haven't taken the time to do it. What I had worked and it was just something I could do for some added tools and API access, etc. If they do decide I've broken their rules somehow, well - that would be motivation.
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On the days when I don't post and the only post is the automated one at the end of the day, should I still send the newsletter out? Let me know.
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Starting the day with newsletter coding. Not sure what is going on, but the newsletter isn't sending. As far as I can see, it is working on my side and an issue with tinyletter. We'll see if this resolves tomorrow or what.
I have already been thinking of moving the newsletter to another sender, and just haven't made the move yet.
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Tweaking the Newsletter
Spent a little bit this morning tweaking the newsletter code. I cut out some empty space to make it look better.
Also, I've decided to invert the order of posts. It has been publishing posts newest to oldest for the newsletter, I've decided to invert it, so the emails will now read chronological through the day. It hasn't happened since I started the newletter, but there are some days where I do multiple entries on a developing news story. And I think for the purposes of the newsletter, this makes more sense.
I'm still trying to figure out why some UTF8 characters don't encode right for it. Not sure where it's getting mucked up.
And, sort of invisible to you, I'm changing the creation process for the newsletter. Up to now, the email sending has been a quasi-automatic process. The system would automatically generate it via a cron job. But then the newsletter tool still requires me to manually approve it. So, depending on how late I stay up it might go the same night or first then in the morning when I wake up or, honestly, it sometimes goes out when the dogs wake me up to go outside in the middle of the night.
In any case, I've now made it so that it will be a fully manual process. The intent being when I've made my last post for the night, I can click a link to initiate the process. I dislike the fact that more often than not the newsletter for yesterday is arriving at 9am Eastern for most people. There is of course the chance that this new process is simply not going to work and I'll keep forgetting to send it. I have an idea for a more elaborate system which has the safety catch of sending it each night if I haven't manually done so, but I don't know if that system is needed yet. We'll see.
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Daily Newsletter
In my continuing efforts to let more people read this blog, I've implemented (hopefully) a simple daily newsletter (sign up here. It will send in the evening and include all of a day's postings. I am purposefully keeping the design basic, aiming for ease of consumption. There will definitely be some glitches to work out as we go, but here's hoping it proves useful for folks.
I am using an old mailing list that I had set up on TinyLetter. I've removed almost everyone who had previously subscribed since this is an entirely new effort. And, given that it's going to be going from one email in the past three years to a now daily cadence, I felt it was prudent.
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Two Important Tools with the Waning Days of RSS
Kill the Newsletter - Create a one-use email inbox where every email it receives is turned into an RSS feed.
FetchRSS - A website which allows you to create an RSS for a blog-esque website including a very easy to use picker to identify the different elements on the page that can build the RSS feed.
With these tools, I can turn so much more of the information I consume online into an RSS feed to be imported into my RSS reader.
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