Why I Developed My Own Email Newsletter System
canopic jug writes:
Technologist Daniel Aleksandersen writes about a newsletter syndication system he has written. One of the itches he chose to scratch was the matter of being able to cull fake subscriptions which are problematic when commercial service charge per subscriber. Another was that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) made it more advantageous to self-host. Several other interesting capabilities stand out.
The email newsletter is managed and delivered by a purpose-built software I developed in October 2018. I wrote it because I wasn't happy with commercial offerings like MailChimp. I'd also reviewed self-hosted open-source options like phpList and found them lacking.
[...]I don't know what people want to read about. Some articles get really popular and other people just don't care about it. I'm always surprised by which articles get popular and which don't. I don't know what any individual reader might be interested in. I don't know what the majority of subscribers are interested in either.
To hedge my bets, and so that I don't have to worry about it, the article order in the newsletter is randomized for every recipient. This system allows me the freedom to just write what I want without thinking about how something might perform in the newsletter.
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