New wordpress newsletter services
This week, I’ll write somewhat of a personal anouncement. As I had a lot of technical difficulties the last months with my former newsletter service, GetResponse, I decided to ditch it and move on. It took a while finding something I need, but I found something neatly integrating with WordPress…
What went wrong
So for the longest time, about when I started my blog, I used a service that was called GetRevue. I liked it very much as it was simple and tightly integrated into Twitter, before it became X. As Twitter was destroyed by a “philanthropist” so was GetRevue and the service shut down. By then I had already established a small following that received my monthly newsletter.
So I switched to GetResponse as it was hyped as one of the best newsletter services around. Unfortunately, it was not as simple as the service before and it took way more time to compose a monthly newsletter. But I stuck to it as I was tired of searching for alternatives. Then suddenly, I got a lot of spam bots subscribing to my newsletter and GetResponse asked me to install several security measures. They didn’t seem to work and finally I gave up, as this was taking too much time already.
Where I am now
So I searched again and found something interesting. As my website is a self-hosted WordPress site, I thought, why not self-host a newsletter service as well? But again, I did not really find what I was seraching for, but I found something else. I found MailPoet, a WordPress plugin. It is very convenient as I do not have to use another service and can compose my newsletters right here in the backend.
This month, I will send my first newsletter through them and really really hope, that it will work smoothly. So to those who are already subscribed: I am sorry I missed the last two months. Hopefully now we can continue as usual. And to those who are not subscribed yet: Do you want to know what the newsletter is about?
What is the newsletter about
First off: It is short. I am a subscriber to some newsletters as well and I never make it through them. I have so much to read from day to day, that I can’t read several newsletters as well. So I decided to keep it short and monthly (instead of weekly). The newsletter is foremost a reminder for and collection of the current month posts. In case you missed one, you can see a nice overview in the newsletter. But wait, there is more.
I start the newsletter with some personal notes. What I have done this month or what I am about to do. The idea behind this is to give a small window into the life of an academic and what we have to deal with. These are usually topics that I do not cover in my blog posts. Sometimes there are useful links as well. I also had a section called “Tweet of the month”, but for obvious reasons that has become the “Toot of the month” where I present something beautiful or funny from Mastodon. That’s about it. Curious? It’s free and save. You can subscribe right here on the right side!
