If you’ve wondered over to the Buy Me a Coffee profile page with links and other details about this and that, you know that I’ve been giving the double newsletter approach the old college try for a few weeks now. Not only this Dan Hugo content (riveting, yes), but two newsletters for each of three podcast shows as well (a Show Notes newsletter via Substack and a Weekend Edition via Revue).
My goal here was mostly to try out the new coolness that is newsletters (as opposed to bulk emailing via Constant Contact, Mailchimp, etc, independent content creators jumped in head first with Substack, and Twitter bought Revue, and there are some other platforms like paper.li and buttondown.email and probably many more than one would think could exist at one time). I have been known to write a word or two now and then, and I do have a Medium account (
http://danhugo.medium.com ) and I did just add another article in the Danny DeKeto series (about following a ketogenic diet).
I think emailed newsletters are useful and appealing. I take a few emailed news sources and I read them when I can, and they are there waiting for me if I can’t. I also visit the associated websites where applicable, and I am a big fan of RSS feeds (though they should be deprecated in favor of embedding schema.org metadata, IMHO… but the idea is generally good).
I don’t particularly like the way content is constructed (this is particularly true with Substack, though their online editor is better than that used by Revue, for what that’s worth), and there are some other issues that probably fall under the “Service A lets you do a, b, and c, while Service B lets you do those and e, but if you want d, too bad.” The workflow could use some work, or some flexibility, but at the end of the day, for me, I would rather be able to own the workflow.
None of this is helped by the fact that I’m not getting much traction with the Revue newsletters. I haven’t spent a lot of time analyzing this, because I would rather migrate to generation of newsletters (and syndication feeds, and whatever else) from a core content database that is mine, mine, mine. No surprise here, I should be able to turn an idea into an implementation, and that time is rapidly approaching.
So, if the stars align and the amount of smoke in the air here in Vegas stays about the same or heads back toward whatever normal is, I would like to transition this newsletter (and Substack, second) to the blog-based newsletter approach, where I add items to a backing store (database, whatever) and from there build the things, like web pages and email newsletters and whatnot. Nothing magic here, other than, use of Revue will be paused for August (across all of my newsletter efforts, not just this one) and we’ll see what can get done…
Stay tuned, and if you get an issue of this newsletter in your inbox after this one, it will likely be a request that you subscribe to the New newsletter scheme.