Thord D. Hedengren

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Tag: newsletters

  • Substack adds support for domains – but there’s a catch

    Substack, the hyped and overall pretty excellent newsletter and website service that I use for Switch to iPad, has added support for custom domains. That means that I could, if I wanted to, point my domain switchtoipad.com to my Substack page, which of course is located at switchtoipad.substack.com. Prettier, no?

    I was going to do just that, but then I saw that Substack has decided to charge a $50 one-time fee to activate this feature on your account. This to me is a greedy money-grab, and I won’t do it. In fact, it makes me wonder if Substack is the place for me at all. I’ll surely rethink my strategy henceforth.

  • Kill the Newsletter

    If you’re fed up with all those newsletters clogging up your inbox, and you don’t want to pony up for Feedbin or Feedly, then Kill the Newsletter is for you. It’s a clever little service that lets you create a unique email address for signing up to a newsletter, and then converts its issues to an Atom feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite feed reader app or service. You could even add it to Feedly in the free tier…

    I love these one thing well apps and services.

  • Food For Your Inbox

    Looking for some new newsletters to subscribe to? Then this mammoth list from InsideHook might be for you, serving up 80 newsletters across a number of topics. My only gripe with it would be that it doesn’t feature neither Switch to iPad nor RE:THORD…

    I’m really enjoying the newsletter resurgence, but I know not all of you do, because it clogs up the inbox. The solution I’ve gone with is using Feedbin, a RSS service, which gives you a unique Feedbin email address for your subscriptions. That means I get (most of my) newsletters with my RSS feeds, a perfect fit if you ask me. Feedly has this feature too, nowadays, but not on the free tier. Both services are worth paying for, so pick the one you like if you want a good RSS – and newsletter subscription – service.

  • Suck Again

    Remember Suck.com? If you do, you’re old. Sorry. If you don’t you have your youth (or something), but you also missed out on a piece of internet history. Luckily you get a second chance (and old-timers get a dose of nostalgia, possibly), because a fellow called Mark MacDonald is republishing the Suck.com pieces in a newsletter called Suck Again. Ad free and blessed by the original editors, this one’s yet another notch in the newsletter is the new black belt.

  • On newsletters

    On newsletters

    I love newsletters. Once upon a time, I started my professional online publishing career with one. It was called TVspel.nu and was about video games. I did a whole bunch of issues, but it didn’t take long until a website launched, and that made more sense to focus on. This was in 1997, pre-dotcom. I made some money, but didn’t get rich. It was the basis of my first business, alongside running the official site for Sega Dreamcast in Scandinavia. It was a nice way to make a living as an 18 year old. Incidentally, TVspel.nu ended up being one of the biggest gaming websites in Sweden.

    My next serious newsletter was Kong. It had been a site before, but I canned it, probably because I was bored. There were 30+ issues of the newsletter Kong Magazine, before I had some money issues. Selling ads in newsletters has always been hard, and it still is. The Holiday season was approaching, and I launched a site for Kong, sold all the ads, and could live to eat another day. As with TVspel.nu, the site flourished, priding itself on having great content, an editorial vision (not very common with video game sites back then), and a shitload of visitors. It sparked other sites. It made money, post-dotcom. In the end I sold it, because I’ve had it with video games and the Swedish media landscape for the time being. That’s when I started at The Blog Herald, but that’s another story.

    (more…)

  • We agree on newsletters

    Yesterday say the first issue of RE:THORD, my newsletter. In it, among other things, is an essay about newsletters. I know, very meta, but I love newsletters, so it felt right. Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks about these things at the moment. Warren Ellis publishes a newsletter called Orbital Operations, and yesterday he wrote this, regarding the newsletters’s state at the moment:

    I’ve been doing these since the 1990s. I’ll be still here after everyone once more decides that they’re crap.

    A few hours earlier, I wrote this in RE:THORD #1:

    I love the fact that newsletters are getting new wind, that they’re so hip that they can be launched with an editorial staff and everything (hi Lenny!). Newsletters are fun, they’re a way to open up the conversation with the audience in a way that might not become as infected as the comments on your blog. This – the new, fun, hip, thing – is probably a fad, though. It’ll blow over. When it has, there will still be great newsletters, and I’ll be just as fascinated by them. Hopefully you will be too.

    Quite the coincidence, and the testament that newsletters are really interesting right now. At least for us old folks that still thinks email is cool.

  • TinyLetter rides the newsletter wave

    Journalism.co.uk lists ten newsletter for media junkies to help start off a more informed 2014, or something like that. It’s a decent list, but that’s not the interesting part here.

    Out of these ten newsletters, six are powered by TinyLetter, the free and overly simple newsletter service maintained by MailChimp. The remaining four newsletters use more conventional services. This is just another example of the rekindled newsletter trend, and the fact that we’re good with simpler things, such as TinyLetter. Personally I’d prefer raw text emails, but maybe that’s just grumpy old me.

  • The newsletter's been here all along

    Rusty Foster, editor of Today in Tabs, in an interview with Digiday:

    Was 2014 the year of the newsletter?

    The newsletter has been there all along! I wanted it to be like, “Oh, it’s a revival!” and in a certain small subcommunity, it is. Journalists are starting to use newsletters, and people who haven’t been paying attention to them have been paying attention to them in a way that they weren’t. But the newsletter has always been there. In terms of commerce, newsletters have always been a big thing.