Sending emails requires too much clicking and typing. Yes, it takes just few minutes every week, but inefficiency makes me miserable, and the miserable feeling lasts longer than the clicking. I love writing, and I do not like dull clicking. Humans hate boring mechanical work, and robots adore it. Right? At least I think so. Let’s automate this.
As you know, Jekyll powers my website. To publish a new page, I just create a file and push to GitHub directly from my text editor. I love the simplicity of this workflow, and I wanted the same for my newsletter updates. Fortunately, you can create RSS-to-email campaigns.
Another thing that makes me miserable is default email templates. They’re too bloated, too generic. They all look alike. Maybe it’s just me, but I rarely appreciate those colorful postcards with fancy fonts. I prefer plain text and words.
Newsletter
, and click Create list.Minimalist
, then in the
Import from my computer section click on Choose file under
HTML page.<datarepeater>
and the content of <rssitemlink>
).Done!
If you need to change something, go to the Automation page, select your campaign from the list, then click on the Edit this workflow link in the sidebar.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<style>body { max-width: 400px; width: 90%; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; }</style>
<!--[if mso]><table><tr><td width="400"><![endif]-->
<p>Hi [firstname,fallback=]
<datarepeater type="rss" src="https://www.romanzolotarev.com/newsletter.xml">
<rssbody paragraphs="all" />
<p><rssitemlink>View on romanzolotarev.com</rssitemlink>
</datarepeater>
<p style="margin-top: 4em; color: #777777;">
Sent to [email]<br>
<unsubscribe style="color: #777777;">Unsubscribe</unsubscribe>
Note: I intentionally omitted certain HTML tags, because I
can. There is a hack with table
for Outlook. Please email
me if something does not work for you, or if you know a nicer solution.
I spent a lot of time to automate this. I could create a hundred campaigns for sure. For me, it’s probably not worth the time. But would I do it again? Hell yeah! I can’t help but make robots work. Automate everything! And hopefully, this recipe will save a few hours for you and other humans.
As a side effect, I have a newsletter archive hosted on my site, accessible even to those who didn’t subscribe on the first day. Neat!