I’m using Sendy for our newsletters. Recently, verison 6 was released. Here’s how I updated like a pro on my VPS via SSH. The beginner-friendly but ultimately drag-and-drop/FTP-based online instructions assume that you will be moving files over from “new location” to “existing location”. That’s quite cumbersome when all you have is SSH.
After a couple weeks of experimentation, I find that twice weekly email delivery of my recent blog posts is one too many. I wrote a lot in the past months, so each issue contained quite a few links. But who wants more email with less links in it? I don’t, so I changed the interval to weekly, delivered every Thursday, covering a summary of the whole past week.
When you want to merge newsletters in MailChimp like I do and tell your subscribers to sign up at the new list and unsubscribe from the old to not receive any notifications – then you’re setting yourself up for trouble! Because it turns out that mass-migrations from list A to list B mostly register as mass unsubscribes from list A. And an unsubscribe rate of 9% or higher (I don’t know the actual minimum value, but 9.23% triggered it for my account) will automatically up the risk level of your whole MailChimp account.
Not everybody knows how to consume RSS, so I wanted to try to make updates to the blog available via email. That’s why I have now revived the newsletter signup page. This is the plan: I’ll experiment with this setup for a while, but I think the current options cover almost anything I currently do, or plan to do, so that both developers and customers of my apps get something interesting in their mailboxes.