One thing I’m trying to figure out is how we can potentially associate any prompt to sign up (e.g. “Subscribe to my blog:”) with the actual sign up form that gets included in a post. That way we can exclude that entire section in certain situations, like when the post gets emailed out. (Since each email contains the entire post.)
One way could be to wrap the prompt in pseudo-HTML tags, like this:
<!--emailsub-->
Subscribe to my blog:
<!--/emailsub-->
And then the signup form would automatically be inserted after that prompt. But this is a little more complicated and requires some explanation. The ideal situation would be just inserting a comment where you want the subscription box:
Subscribe to my blog:
<!--emailsub-->
But then in the email, in place of <!--emailsub-->, we’d probably need to say something like “You’re already subscribed.” And that string would need to be localized in every language, and wouldn’t be flexible, and so on.
Thank you, so much, Matt! I definitely hope you will have a “subscribe” sign-up at the end of each post – especially since the bottom of the page is a place where a subscription section could get lost (since most people are used to a subscribe signup button nearer the top of pages in most blogs and websites). I would rather see a subscribe section or button near the top of the page, but I also know you are working with Write.as design. I definitely love the idea of a sign-up at the bottom of each post. Please! Thank you!
One other thought – Can you include subscribe capability for other pages besides “blog” pages? Would love that capability very much. I love making things easy for readers. Thank you, again.
Does this pick up anonymous posts that are then added to your blog? Or do you have to ensure the first time you publish the post is direct to your blog?
I sometimes post as anonymous to check the format is correct etc, before making it live to my blog but I have a feeling the email subscription thing doesn’t pick this up in the same way. The entry I posted last night has not been sent to my email (which I used to test the subscription).
Are you doing a similar flow to what @digitalgyoza mentioned? That is, publishing an Anonymous post, changing the scheduled time, then moving it to a blog? Because it does look like there’s a bug right now where that flow won’t schedule the post to be emailed (fixing this today).
Yep! Since static / pinned pages are essentially the same as blog posts, you’ll be able to add a subscription box there, too. This is another reason for making it flexible like this: I was imagining people might create a “subscribe” page that just has some text and the subscription box.
I am not sure about that, because I only recently discovered the perks of posting anonymous (being able to ‘preview’ and edit before it shows on my blog). I am quite sure these scheduled post were not anonymous, but not 100% sure… sorry. But, if the issue is fixed I trust it will work. If not, I will let you know.
Hi @matt - tested it again and the post I scheduled for today appears on my blog, but not in my e-mail. I created an anonymous post first, edited it, changed scheduled time and then moved it to blog. Hope this is of any help?
Ok, it seems to be a spam-issue with G-Mail - it marks the messages as spam, but not always, which is weird? (But hey, why be surprised?)
Anyway, I have taken care of it now and told the mighty AI to treat this mail nice. I hope it will all be good now.
If not, I will let you know, of course.
@matt - edit: no, still the same regarding scheduled posts:
anonymous post, changing schedule time, moved to blog: does not appear in my inbox.
copied the post-txt, pasted it into a new blog-post, published straight away: 15 mins later it appears in my inbox.
I’ve just signed up and immediately became a paid user just for this!
Made me incredibly happy to see this feature land in write.as
I’ve got one recommendation and one question.
Recommendation :
Based on previous experience with other email subscription providers, if the initial confirmation email is sent using a different name than the blog’s name, people generally don’t confirm signing up to mailing lists.
Currently the confirmation email’s sender name is “Write.as Letters” instead of the blog’s own name, and this will leave many users confused about what’s going on, particularly with custom domain blogs. (Since the only write.as reference they’ll see if they’re attentive is going to be in the footer)
Ideally, it would be fantastic if you guys can use the blog’s own name in the sender-name field of the email, especially for custom domain blogs.
Question :
Is the 500 subscribers limit a hard api limit? If not, can you increase it if I reach out to you with my username? I’ll be using write.as for my product’s announcements & news blog, and I have reasons to believe this quota will quickly fill up as soon as start pointing my users to the blog to follow product updates etc.
Many thanks for Write.as & the email subscription addition you’re are bringing. This is a fantastic service combination, and I hope branching out to multiple other mini-side/future-projects won’t slow you down / distract you from making write.as even better each and every day.
Great recommendation – I just changed it so the confirmation email now shows the name of the blog as the sender. Just note that for now it’ll still come from yourblog@writeasletters.com – we’re still working on full custom domain support.
That’s exciting that you’ll be using Write.as for your product news / announcements! The 500 subscriber limit is soft – no one will get cut off for going a little bit over it. But in the future, we’ll charge for having more subscribers than that, to cover our own costs, which go up with the amount of email we send out.
So if you want to be sure that you don’t hit any limits, I’d recommend upgrading to our Support tier. That’ll give you an essentially unlimited subscriber limit*, and we’ll pay special attention to your account to make sure your list growth goes smoothly. You’ll also get custom domain support on your emails when that’s available.
Thanks again for the input, and keep us in the loop with feedback as you keep trying everything out!
* As an early user of this feature, before we have a pricing model for >500 subscribers, I’m happy to keep the number of subscribers unlimited for anyone on the Support tier.
Sorry for the delayed response – there is still an issue with posts not being emailed when following this flow: anonymous post -> move to blog. Working on a fix now.
Okay, we’re back to work on subscriptions! Sorry for the delays, everyone.
Today we added support for a new shortcode:
<!--emailsub-->
Simply insert this text anywhere in your post to create an email subscription box. You can see it in action on this Subscribe page on my personal blog.
Looking to the future: again, once we have the option to add a post signature across all posts, you’ll be able to simply include this shortcode and show the box on every post.
This begs the question, are there other shortcodes available in write.as that aren’t documented? (also, can you please document this somewhere besides here in the forums?)
Hi Matt, any news regarding the anonymous post issue? It is still there: even without changing the schedule time and only using anonymous as a draft and when done moving it straight to the blog.
Another thing that is still happening: Gmail marks posts as spam, but not always. Even when a previous post is marked as no-spam, it will happen to new posts to be marked as spam after a while. Is this a known issue?
Hi @egoecho, the anonymous post issue is being worked on. The spam issue is a known one as well. @matt could give you more details.
I opened up issues for both on the Github project page - one for the posts being marked as spam problem and the other for the anonymous post workflow. We will keep these updated as we work on them so feel free to follow them and contribute.
Recommendation :
Question :
