My New Newsletter will be...
Mar. 10th, 2026 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
genderjumperAn exercise in the Under-net. I think.
What I call my "newsletter" has for 6-8 years just been sporadic emails I send to my contacts promoting upcoming events featuring myself and others. I was aiming for monthly there for a while, but I'm not sure I've ever averaged better than quarterly. I keep my database of roughly 500 contacts in a locally stored XL file and lose hours at a time every time I get close to sending it trying to keep the 30ish categories up to date. It's not the most efficient system, and there have been some snags along the way.
A while back, I set up an inbox tied to my website through my webhost. The interface was very basic and had severe limitations, even for my meager needs. What really ruined it, though, was the epic number of bounces I would get because apparently my webhost is popular with scammers. I'd get an individualized message for somewhere between two and four-hundred emails saying that they weren't sure I was a real person and that I should click on a link to verify that I was. As if that weren't bad enough, it STILL wouldn't send them the email, not that time nor the next. It was being filtered out well before it even hit their personal spam filters.
So a change has been necessary for a while.
I recently got a decent paycheck for one of my intermittent jobs and decided to invest it into an actual newsletter service. Other than eschewing Goggle and Mailchimp, I didn't have much idea what to do, though. I started looking through some links I'd hoarded (that's a thing I do) and was drawn to Buttondown. Its small-scale services seem adequate for my needs and importantly doesn't push Al or other crap I don't want; as I looked through its optional add-ons, the wheels really started turning, though:
Buttondown also offers to convert RSS feeds into a newsletter.
A quick tangent into "How to create an RSS feed" reminded me how much I love that artifact of the earlier internet and how much it would align with my stated values of moving away from algorithmic tools and back toward hyper-customization. I could kill two birds with one stone: a simpler way to store and report events I'm tracking/attending and the new newsletter. Hell, for slightly more effort, I could still create multiple feeds and just share specific ones as needed.
NP has asked me to hold onto that check in case we need it next week, so I'm unlikely to move rapidly, but it's a joy to know it's out there, not going anywhere. I welcome feedback from anyone who has experience in these matters.
What I call my "newsletter" has for 6-8 years just been sporadic emails I send to my contacts promoting upcoming events featuring myself and others. I was aiming for monthly there for a while, but I'm not sure I've ever averaged better than quarterly. I keep my database of roughly 500 contacts in a locally stored XL file and lose hours at a time every time I get close to sending it trying to keep the 30ish categories up to date. It's not the most efficient system, and there have been some snags along the way.
A while back, I set up an inbox tied to my website through my webhost. The interface was very basic and had severe limitations, even for my meager needs. What really ruined it, though, was the epic number of bounces I would get because apparently my webhost is popular with scammers. I'd get an individualized message for somewhere between two and four-hundred emails saying that they weren't sure I was a real person and that I should click on a link to verify that I was. As if that weren't bad enough, it STILL wouldn't send them the email, not that time nor the next. It was being filtered out well before it even hit their personal spam filters.
So a change has been necessary for a while.
I recently got a decent paycheck for one of my intermittent jobs and decided to invest it into an actual newsletter service. Other than eschewing Goggle and Mailchimp, I didn't have much idea what to do, though. I started looking through some links I'd hoarded (that's a thing I do) and was drawn to Buttondown. Its small-scale services seem adequate for my needs and importantly doesn't push Al or other crap I don't want; as I looked through its optional add-ons, the wheels really started turning, though:
Buttondown also offers to convert RSS feeds into a newsletter.
A quick tangent into "How to create an RSS feed" reminded me how much I love that artifact of the earlier internet and how much it would align with my stated values of moving away from algorithmic tools and back toward hyper-customization. I could kill two birds with one stone: a simpler way to store and report events I'm tracking/attending and the new newsletter. Hell, for slightly more effort, I could still create multiple feeds and just share specific ones as needed.
NP has asked me to hold onto that check in case we need it next week, so I'm unlikely to move rapidly, but it's a joy to know it's out there, not going anywhere. I welcome feedback from anyone who has experience in these matters.
