Tags: subscription

Ethan tagged me in a post. I didn’t feel a thing.

“I’d love to invite a few other folks to share their favorite newsletters”, he wrote.

My immediate thought was that I don’t actually subscribe to many newsletters. But then I remembered that most newsletters are available as RSS feeds, and I very much do subscribe to those.

Reading RSS and reading email feel very different to me. A new item in my email client feels like a task. A new item in my feed reader feels like a gift.

Anyway, I poked around in my subscriptions and found some newsletters in there that I can heartily recommend.

First and foremost, there’s The History Of The Web by Jay Hoffman. Each newsletter is a building block for the timeline of the web that he’s putting together. It’s very much up my alley.

On the topic of the World Wide Web, Matthias has a newsletter called Own Your Web:

Whether you want to get started with your own personal website or level up as a designer, developer, or independent creator working with the ever-changing material of the Web, this little email is for you. ❤✊

On the inescapable topic of “AI”, I can recommend Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter by Professor Emily M. Bender and Doctor Alex Hanna.

Journalist Clive Thompson has a fun newsletter called The Linkfest:

The opposite of doomscrolling: Every two weeks (roughly) I send you a collection of the best Internet reading I’ve found — links to culture, technology, art and science that fascinated me.

If you like that, you’ll love The Whippet by McKinley Valentine:

A newsletter for the terminally curious

Okay, now there are three more newsletters that I like, but I’m hesitant to recommend for the simple reason that they’re on Substack alongside a pile of racist trash. If you decide you like any of these, please don’t subscribe by email; use the RSS feed. For the love of Jeebus, don’t give Substack your email address.

Age of Invention by Anton Howes is a deep, deep dive into the history of technology and industry:

I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers.

Finally, there are two newsletters written by people whose music I listened to in my formative years in Ireland…

When We Were Young by Paul Page recounts his time in the band Whipping Boy in the ’90s:

This will be the story of Whipping Boy told from my perspective.

Toasted Heretic were making very different music around the same time as Whipping Boy. Their singer Julian Gough has gone on to write books, poems, and now a newsletter about cosmology called The Egg And The Rock:

The Egg and the Rock makes a big, specific argument (backed up by a lot of recent data, across many fields), that our universe appears to be the result of an evolutionary process at the level of universes.

There you go—quite a grab bag of newsletter options for you.

Lean Web Club

New from Mr. Vanilla JS himself, Chris Ferdinandi:

A learning space for people who hate the complexity of modern web development.

It’ll be $29 a month or $299 a year (giving you two months worth for free).

Robin Rendle › Newsletters

A rant from Robin. I share his frustration and agree with his observations.

I wonder how we can get the best of both worlds here: the ease of publishing newsletters, with all the beauty and archivability of websites.

About Feeds | Getting Started guide to web feeds/RSS

Matt made this website to explain RSS to people who are as-ye unfamilar with it.

A little while back, Marcus Herrmann wrote about making RSS more visible again with a /feeds page. Here’s his feeds page. Here’s Remy’s.

Seems like a good idea to me. I’ve made mine:

adactio.com/feeds

As well as linking to the usual RSS feeds (blog posts, links, notes), it’s also got an explanation of how you can subscribe to a customised RSS feed using tags.

Then, earlier today, I was chatting with Matt on Twitter and he asked:

btw do you share your blogroll anywhere?

So now I’ve added another URL:

adactio.com/feeds/subscriptions

That’s got a link to my OPML file, exported from my feed reader, and a list of the (current) RSS feeds that I’m subscribed to.

I like the idea of blogrolls making a comeback. And webrings.

Notifier — Convert content sources to RSS feeds

A service that—amongst other things—allows you to read newsletters in your RSS reader.

Brendan Dawes - Adobe Alternatives

Brendan describes the software he’s using to get away from Adobe’s mafia business model.

I’ve been using Mailchimp for years now to send out a weekly newsletter from The Session. But I never visit the Mailchimp website. Instead, I use the API to create a campaign each week, and then send it out. I also use the API whenever a member of The Session updates their email preferences (or changes their details).

I got an email from Mailchimp that their old API was being deprecated and I’d need to update to their more recent one. The code I was using had been happily running for about seven years, but now I’d have to change it.

Luckily, Drew has written a really handy Mailchimp API wrapper for PHP, the language that The Session’s codebase is in. Thanks, Drew! I downloaded that wrapper and updated my code accordingly.

Everything went pretty smoothly. I was able to create campaigns, send campaigns, add new subscribers, and delete subscribers. But I ran into an issue when I wanted to update someone’s email address (on The Session, you can edit your details at any time, including your email address).

Here’s the set up:

use \DrewM\MailChimp\MailChimp;
$MailChimp = new MailChimp('abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123-us1');
$list_id = 'b1234346';
$subscriber_hash = $MailChimp -> subscriberHash('currentemail@example.com');
$endpoint = 'lists/'.$listID.'/members/'.$subscriber_hash;

Now to update details, according to the API, I can use the patch method on that endpoint:

$MailChimp -> patch($endpoint, [
    'email_address' => 'newemail@example.com'
]);

But that doesn’t work. Mailchimp effectively treats email addresses as unique IDs for subscribers. So the only way to change someone’s email address appears to be to delete them, and then subscribe them fresh with the new email address:

$MailChimp -> delete($endpoint);
$newendpoint = 'lists/'.$listID.'/members';
$MailChimp -> post($newendpoint, [
    'email_address' => 'newemail@example.com',
    'status' => 'subscribed'
]);

That’s somewhat annoying, as the previous version of the API allowed email addresses to be updated, but this workaround isn’t too arduous.

Anyway, I figured it share this just in case it was useful for anyone else migrating to the newer API.

Update: Belay that. Turns out that you can update email addresses, but you have to be sure to include the status value:

$MailChimp -> patch($endpoint, [
    'email_address' => 'newemail@example.com',
    'status' => 'subscribed'
]);

Okay, that’s a lot more straightforward. Ignore everything I said.

Web Push Notifications Demo | Microsoft Edge Demos

Push notifications explained using astrology. But don’t worry, there’s also some code, just in case you prefer your explanations to also include models that actually work.

Shadow is now Adobe Edge Inspect | Adobe Edge Inspect Team Blog

Oh, dear. Adobe Shadow gets a new name and a hefty price tag. Yesterday it was free. Today it is $119.88 per year. It’s useful but it’s not that useful.

So, lazy web, who’s working on an open-source alternative?

Last.fm – the Blog · Free the Music

"As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website."

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site - New York Times

Excellent news from the New York Times: no more charging for content. Finally, I can link to NYT articles from blog posts (and del.icio.us).

Ma.gnolia Blog: JSON, HTML, and Microformats. Oh, My!

Magnolia is providing microformat feeds: simple HTML documents marked up with xFolk, hReview or hAtom. It's basically a simple sort of API. Very nice.