Migrating Club Newsletters to Buttondown
Migrating Club Newsletters to Buttondown
Today’s issue of MacStories Weekly is our first issue sent using Buttondown for the email version of the newsletter. We’ve used Mailchimp ever since the Club was first launched, and it is time to move on. Since the company’s acquisition by Intuit, it’s become more enterprise-focused and expensive. But more importantly, it’s never been easy to use.
If you imagine a story with eight images, that’s 16 blocks to paste into Mailchimp’s web app. Add additional clicking around to deal with HTML, links to images, captions, and various other things, and I can tell you as the person who has assembled over 500 issues that it’s a time-consuming, error-prone, and a whole separate parallel process to putting together the website version of an issue.
With Buttondown, the email newsletters you receive will be generated from the RSS feed from the Club website, eliminating the entire assembly process. To say that I’m excited to have those hours back each month would be a vast understatement. I’m also happy to have a system in place that should reduce the assembly errors that occasionally crept into our newsletters in the past.
With the change, the look and feel of the email you receive will change slightly. However, we’ve been able to replicate the design of the Mailchimp version far better than I had expected thanks to the hard work of Robb Knight, to whom I owe a very hearty, ‘Thank you.’
It’s impossible to anticipate everything with a transition like this, so please bear with us if there are a few quirks as we iron out any rough patches. As always, we also welcome your feedback on the newsletters or any other aspect of the Club. Thanks in advance for your patience and for supporting MacStories by being part of the Club.
– John