Wed, 16 Oct 2024

Less whining, more action! I've been talking for a long time about firing up a newsletter again, since everyone says that's the last reliable way to reach customers. So I'm doing that.

After an extensive thread on Bluesky about why I was ruling out each ESP/newsletter service I looked at, I tentatively settled on Buttondown. I say "tentatively" because it's been a little rough. I really, really like the look of the API and things, and of the newsletters I get through it (Charlie Jane Anders', in particular) and because it looks like what I would build if I built a newsletter service. (I did, once upon a time, in the pre-web era and some time thereafter.)

This isn't always a good thing, though: I get the overall impression of "just enough to work." And right now it seems underprovisioned: the status page says everything is "operational" but that's not strictly true: it's running so slowly that it times out frequently, or scripts don't quite load so things don't quite work. I'm hoping this is a transient problem, but if it's not I guess I'll try a different service. Either way, this should be the newsletter signup form for the foreseeable future. It's got minimal formatting right now, but it is functional.

If you sign up now, you'll probably be subjected to all my weird test emails, so you've been warned. But it's technically live.

(And yes, I'm going to take the time to dig out the yellow felt in just a little bit so I can wrap up this design.)