Yes, it’s a rare Wednesday post, but we’re not talking airlines today. Today I have some good news about improvements in subscriptions and comments now that I’m best testing Postmatic 2.0 on this site. It’s awesome, and here’s what’s happening.
If you don’t get the free email, you’ll now have even more reasons to do it.
New Digest Subscription
In addition to sending posts out as they go live, there is now a weekly digest option. When you subscribe on the site, you’ll get an email entitled “Please select your subscription.” Reply with “instant” to get them when they go live or with “digest” to get a weekly summary. The weekly email will provide post snippets from the previous week every Sunday morning at 3:45am PT.
Faster Emails
Emails are now sending faster. The new system should have everything out within a few minutes of the post going live at 3:45am PT each day there’s a post.
Easier Unsubscribe
If you’re a subscriber, you’ll see that instead of only being able to respond with “unsubscribe,” you can now also just click the link at the bottom of the email to make it happen.
Comment with Facebook or Twitter Accounts
If you’d like, you can now use your Twitter or Facebook account to leave a comment on the blog. You can still fill out details the old way if you want. This is just another option.
Better Replies via Email
You’ll still be able to reply to a comment via email, but now you’ll see a “reply” link next to every comment. You no longer have to worry if you’re replying to the right comment via email. Just click the link and it’ll open a new email with the right address ready to go.
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Hopefully you like all these changes. They should all be for the better. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns. And remember, if you want to subscribe, you’ll see the sign-up box in the sidebar to the right of this post as well as in a box below.
20 comments on “Big Improvements in Subscriptions and Comments”
Jason from Postmatic here.
Thanks for putting up with us for a year now! I hope you all are enjoying our products. I’ll stick around and answer any questions throughout the day.
One important note for subscribers: You can switch your subscriptions to the weekly digest from the footer of the daily email. And back and forth.
Hope this works out for you. What I’ve found annoying is getting those emails that say they pausing posted replies to a blog due to high response. Sometimes I’ll get one after only a few comments have been left and other times I’ll not get any from one of your blogs that has had a ton of replies to. I never ‘clicked’ the spot it says to click to start receiving the email replies again, since when I have, I never noticed anything different.
Thanks for the feedback, David.
Part of Postmatic 2 is an overhaul of the system involved in keeping too much/too little email flowing. It’s not quite ready for testing yet but as soon as it is we will let you all know. There are a ton of improvements to it coming.
Jason
David SF – I actually boosted the limit on that recently. Are you still getting it a lot? I can boost it again.
Come to think of it, I haven’t seen it lately
David SF – Well if you do, let me know. I can always up it again if needed.
I have had suboptimal experiences with other e-mail based blogs/groups. So I much prefer the RSS feed option. Unfortunately, the Cranky feed has become contaminated with several other lists/sites: Instead of getting just one article per day, I get between 10 and 30 articles. Which is rather annoying, since those non-CF articles cause my feed-reader to crash when I try to close them.
Hey Mario,
I was just checking the Cranky feed at crankyflier.com/feed and it looks fine in my reader. Perhaps you are having feed reader issues? Try resubscribing perhaps.
Mario – Are you maybe on the comment feed? The crankyflier.com/feed seems to be working fine for me.
No, I am not on the comment feed. But I am getting multiple articles from Cynthia Drescher, Lilit Marcus, Alexander lobrano, Katherine LaGrave, Jane Sung, Laura Carroll, Jayna Maleri, Krisanne Fordham, among others. I will try the resubscribing option above.
Mario – I have no idea what that might be. I would agree that you should just unsubscribe and resubscribe. This sounds like it might be a feed reader issue.
is the front page still going to look like messy poo?
Just a comment about the mailto links that you’re presumably using for subscribers to allow them to comment via email. They’re really annoying if they open in your default mail client. Let’s say someone is on a web-based email service (Gmail, Hotmail, etc) and clicks one of these mailto links. Then the computer will automatically open Outlook. If the person doesn’t use Outlook for email, this is useless because the person can’t send an email.
I’m not a subscriber so can’t personally verify, but it’s just something to watch out for.
You can configure your computer to open mailto links in whatever client or browser you would like. In particular Gmail has a nice utility that takes care of it called Google Notifier.
Your content is high quality regardless of your web design and interface.
Is there any chance of a subscribe to comments via email option without commenting?
The old system had that and I miss it.
Indeed. Just reply to any new post notification with the word ‘subscribe’.
What about for those of us who read it on the web and don’t get the post notifications in email?
Hey Nick,
We haven’t had that built into Postmatic for a long while. It’s on our radar to bring it back someday soon though.
Great ideas! Thanks!