Since the emails don’t include the audio embed, emails for podcast episodes may be confusing.
Here’s a screenshot from my homepage, where it’s obvious there’s an audio embed.
And here’s a screenshot from my email, where it’s not so obvious.
Users may want to state the latest post is a podcast to avoid confusion.
I wonder if the audio embeds is a limitation in email clients… Micro.blog should be including the audio in the HTML, but if email clients are ignoring it, we could change it to always link to the MP3.
That’s correct about only having 1 list of subscribers. We’ll consider expanding this… I don’t want to add too much complexity, but I can see the value in having 2-3 lists. If the content is completely different, though, a separate blog might also be a good work-around today.
For an “All Posts” category, that should be possible automatically using the Filters feature to assign categories.
I had this same problem with newsletters on write.as. Here’s a link if you’re interested in Matt Baer’s quick thoughts on it.
I’m using Fastmail; maybe the problem is provider-specific.
Edit:
I just took a look using the Mail app on my Mac, and the audio is embedded. (See below.)
So my mistake: The problem is on my end.
We’ve improved the emails so it’s possible to customize the CSS. Details here: Manton Reece - Styling newsletters in Micro.blog
ngl was a little disappointed that by default the entire Article is displayed (remember mine only send Articles, so it makes more sense to just include previews & links).
Is it the case that the same trick you describe to condense Articles on home page would work on email newsletter @manton?
Going further, would it be possible to exploit the og tags in the Open Graph plugin to make those display in the email?
Hi @manton!
I switched my m.b. plan to the Newsletter one this week because I’m trying to add this to my blog.
Is there a way to only send long-form posts on a weekly basis, without the short-form ones? That option is not available and would be my preferred one. Any other ideas I could handle this? different feed/category or something like this?
Unfortunately that isn’t possible on a blog with mixed posts. You’d have to only publish long-form posts.
Other people have also asked for greater flexibility with the filters, as well as allowing multiple options at once and then giving the reader the choice from which to choose via frequency, type, and so on.
Thanks for clarification. So this means for my content I publish, that I can’t use the M.B. newsletter feature and might have to chose an external service that pulls in the RSS/JSON feed from a category or even copy&paste the content in there that I want to have in a weekly newsletter.
Yes, that’s correct. I do this at the minute and it’s definitely quite difficult; apart from anything else you have to wait for the newsletter to be generated by Micro.blog, make sure your settings are correct for it to wait the maximum time before publishing (currently 3 hours), and then make your edits in time.
At this point I’d say the feature is an opinionated, lightweight automated newsletter companion to your blog.
Did you figure this out or get an answer? I am also looking to see if it is possible to have a preview to articles followed by links to the main article, in a newsletter.
Nope as the aboves said we’re hoping that @manton will build!
Tbh I don’t think it’s high-priority until subscriber bulk-import is allowed. I for one don’t have them going out to anyone yet just with on-site signup!
I think micro.blog’s email newsletters width is too wide by default:
It might be a good idea to limit to some reasonable width by default. In the interim, how do I do it myself via CSS? I tried the following and it didn’t work.
.microblog_email {
max-width: 650px;
}
Your CSS is right. Unfortunately, Gmail tosses out the CSS. You should see your change in another mail client.
Hey David, I just saw your latest newsletter. It somehow got buried. I love your masthead!
To truncate a post, just copy the link from the permalink that follows the post contents and then make a markdown link with some text like “Read more…” and chop off the text you don’t want. That’s how I did it for a long article in my latest newsletter. It was super easy.
Ah. Is there any solution for gmail? Majority of the people use Gmail, unfortunately.
Yeah, almost half of my subscribers are using Gmail.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a solution, at this point. The Gmail experience has been improved (it used to be that you had to scroll side to side to read the email). I think the next step is that newsletter templates will be introduced at some time in the future.
This is one of the reasons why it’ll be good to have a version of the newsletters stored on your site.
Unfortunately, a lot of email clients ignore max-width. I try to get around this by setting the font-size to 20px. It’s not ideal but it’s the best I could come up with. I don’t know whether it works in Gmail, though.
With the end of the month approaching, I am starting to look at my newsletter. I like this solution. I think that I was thinking of a way that would work within email clients, but I have learnt through these pages of the lack of standards within such clients, so this is another way…and more importantly client independent!