I published the first (planned) issue of the newsletter via Micro.blog today about my first evening in Sydney. I’d scheduled the post & it worked as expected. Sure, I want to improve the styling of the emails. But it’s good to post at a single place. All feedback welcome!
Meta
I’ve moved all the posts from Ghost to Micro.blog. With a single outlet for all my writing now, I’ve got an archive of the posts, the likes of which would make the future newsletter issues. With each update, this place continues to be better and closer to what I need. Yay!
A request if you are serving a newsletter. Please mention what I, as a reader, can expect when I sign up for your newsletter. It would be great if the subscribe page on your blog describes this and also links to the archive of the older posts.
With Micro.blog simplifying newsletters, many folks that I already interact with have enabled the option. If I haven’t subscribed to you, know that I am already closely following you on the platform and via RSS. I am an active community member, I hardly miss anything you say 😊
As much as I love Ghost as a blogging platform, I hate maintaining an additional platform. I needed to keep it on because it provided a wonderful way to deliver newsletters as an extension to a regular blog. Another reason I used it was the editor — it is hands-down the best web editor interface out there. But, I never draft my newsletter posts directly in the web interface anymore. I use Ulysses for all forms of writing, and I love it.
With Micro.blog supporting the email newsletters, I can again bring all my writing to a single place. That will be one less platform to manage and to pay for. So, the Slanting Nib newsletter shifts to Micro.blog now.
Today, I unintentionally delivered an email newsletter from Micro.blog to my subscribers. While importing the older posts to the new system, even a post with earlier date got scheduled for email delivery. Thankfully, it was a single post. Need to be wary now while importing.
An easy upgrade to Micro.blog premium just for email newsletters. Plus it’s in line with what I wanted. Feedback to follow. For now, the plan is to email long-form posts to the subscribers. I will move Slanting Nib posts and subscribers here. I would love if you join the group.
Assuming Manton is about to announce some way of emailing posts or digest of post to the subscribers of Micro.blog hosted blogs, here’s how I wish it works. Email is just another cross-posting option. I know it’s tricky, and it will not work that way given Micro.blog, as timeline, also supports feeds from external blogging hosts. But here’s how I hope it works for it to be useful for me.
The writer selects a category (or a group of categories) for emailing. The posts she publishes under those categories are emailed to the subscribers. Subscribers decide whether they want an email for every post or for a digest of the posts (on a defined schedule — daily, weekly).
This would be a good start, everything else can come later. I have no idea if this is even a feature Manton is working on. But he says it’s “totally unique”. So, I am hoping it works very different from typical newsletter services.
Now that Micro.blog can schedule a post, it supports the bare minimum set of features that a basic blogging system should, according to me. Both this and the drafts filters were easy fixes. It makes using the web interface for posting a lot more usable.
PS: I had scheduled this post to go live at a later time :-)
Now that Drummer supports Markdown, I find it’s a nice change overall. There are times when I invariably want the power of Markdown while writing some long posts. It’s good that Drummer has that option now. I also like how Dave is implementing it – it’s just a new node type. More I think about that, it feels very similar to WordPress’ block-editor, but much better and simple. Even with this though, here’s how I summarize my thought.
I do not want to unnecessarily hamper the simplicity of posting with Drummer. That lack of complexity is this system’s USP.