Email newsletter subscriptions

Hosting on Micro.blog
#1

Micro.blog can now manage letting readers subscribe to your blog and receive emails for new blog posts. I’ve posted an announcement and overview over on my blog.

Other details to know about how Micro.blog email newsletters work:

When you first enable this feature, Micro.blog will create a “Subscribe” page on your blog with an HTML form for readers to subscribe with their email address. You can rename this page or delete it and copy the HTML to other pages or blog templates. Micro.blog will always email subscribers to confirm their email address.

For the weekly and monthly options, emails are created around 9am in your local time zone. Monthly emails are sent on the 1st of the month. If you disable and then re-enable the feature, Micro.blog will reset when it thinks the next email should go out, which might mean sending an additional email even if a week or month hadn’t passed yet. Try to avoid changing the settings often.

Micro.blog keeps track of which posts have been collected into an email. It won’t include the same post twice even if you edit it or change the date.

#2

  1. your video guide was good on the M.b side, but would be useful to see preview of what email actually looks like, especially for ‘Collection’ emails. Is it just a list of linked titles? or OG cards?

  2. Am I right in thinking you can only have 1 list of subscribers, and you can only send them on a single type of schedule?
    In future, it would be helpful for me to build 2 lists to send out my Arts & Tech Categories separately. Understand you wanna start simple though. Also importing subscriber lists from e.g. MailChimp, though I’m aware you wanna avoid people abusing for spam.

  3. Assuming it’s possible to hack “collect all short & long blog posts into monthly email”, by creating an All Posts category.

#4

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.

Screen Shot 2021-12-07 at 10.12.58 AM
Screen Shot 2021-12-07 at 10.12.58 AM1002×502 26.4 KB

And here’s a screenshot from my email, where it’s not so obvious.

Screen Shot 2021-12-07 at 10.13.15 AM
Screen Shot 2021-12-07 at 10.13.15 AM968×388 32.5 KB

Users may want to state the latest post is a podcast to avoid confusion.

#5

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.

#6

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.

#7

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.)

Screen Shot 2021-12-07 at 11.22.30 AM
Screen Shot 2021-12-07 at 11.22.30 AM950×596 47.4 KB

So my mistake: The problem is on my end.

#8

We’ve improved the emails so it’s possible to customize the CSS. Details here: Manton Reece - Styling newsletters in Micro.blog

#9

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?