From a recent People & Blogs with Matt Webb:
Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?
If I were to start a blog today, I would start an email newsletter. And that would be a mistake.
I agree.
Although I published a tiny email newsletter for 6 years, and it was helpful in innumerable ways, my instrument is the blog, not the newsletter.
And yet I realize that not everyone (relatively speaking, let’s be honest, very few) have a toolchain set up to read blogs by RSS, as god intended.
And so, as a service to the travelling public, I’ve long supported subscribing to this blog by email, via a daily digest received on days when there are posts.
I originally did that using Feedburner, then MailChimp, and now, starting a few weeks ago, Buttondown.
The switch to Buttondown was triggered by MailChimp just, one, day breaking down and giving up, with no clear path to a diagnosis. I’d been reading the blog of Buttondown’s founder for awhile, and liked the cut of his jib, so I exported my 100-odd subscribers from MailChimp, imported them into Buttondown, and setup an RSS-to-Email pipeline. It was pretty painless.
Things haven’t been all rosy since then: after a day of successful operation, my Buttondown digest stopped sending, with items piling up in the queue. Support was friendly, but the path to a solution was slower than I would have liked. They worked hard to repair our relationship—harder, I imagine, than my $9/month fee warrants—and things seem to be working fine now (although there was a mysterious empty email that went out a few days ago that I’m waiting to hear about from support).
This is all to say: if you want to read the blog, but prefer the convenience of receiving it by email, feel free: subscribe right here.
About This Blog
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way).
I have been writing here since May 1999: you can explore the 25+ years of blog posts in the archive.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, or a podcast RSS feed that just contains audio posts. You can also receive a daily digests of posts by email.
Comments
I hope getting via email isn…
I hope getting via email isn’t a pain for you. I’m into simple. For me. I am in the 4th season of my life and spinning with Tooo much in our world to sort. I need to get outside and smell the roses. Time needed for all and necessary. I really enjoy waking up and seeing your writings etc Thanks for waking me up. And providing thoughts.
At least I can say that I…
At least I can say that I noticed the difference in the transition. When you do post, and I do get the notification, it is usually the first thing I read. I have learned much, been entertained and inspired to do things, read, and more. And I always go to ruk.ca to read because, well, I like it that way. For that reason, I miss the ruk.ca link that was at the top of the page in the previous version of the email notification. This was also my preference because there was a rare time I missed a notification and I could keep scrolling and reading until I was caught up. I take this occasion to again thank you for your blog, newsletter, blogletter. K
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