Updates from December
366 days is enough time to build quite a lot, especially when building with a team. That’s Buttondown’s 2024 story. What began as a small hobby project in a Seattle coffee shop on a rainy Saturday afternoon is now a robust and growing company. One that shipped a better writing experience, analytics, and settings, a live-updating demo site, comments, cross-posting support, and much more in the past year.
Along with everything we shipped in 2024, we also found time to add a few new Buttondown features in December to wrap up the year.
Premium-only content blocks inside emails
Who wants to send two newsletters when one would do? Buttondown’s brand new content blocks make it easy to send a single newsletter with content for both paid and free subscribers. There are two types of content blocks: Free-only and Premium-only.
Drop in content for paid subscribers by opening your email editor and typing “/premium-only block”. Then, to create an upsell call to action, type “/free-only block” and tell the people what they’re missing!
Read more about content blocks and all the other formatting options in the Fancy mode docs.
Embed Bluesky posts and profiles in emails
We released not one but two Bluesky embed options last month.
Paste a Bluesky profile URL in your emails and it’ll look like this:
Paste a Bluesky post URL in your emails it’ll look like this:
when will my husband [^1] come back from war [^2] [^1]: baby sister [^2]: the grocery store
— Justin Duke (@jmduke.com) 2024-12-18T21:22:11.154Z
These embeds work “out of the box” in your newsletter and your archives, no setup or integration required.
From the blog
Want to try an experiment on your newsletter in 2025? How about a pop-up email newsletter—a limited-time newsletter about a single topic. Our guide covers the who, what, when, why, and most importantly, how of publishing (and sometimes erasing!) a limited-run email series. They’re fun, low-commitment, and timely, for writers and subscribers.
And when considering where to publish in the new year, remember: Portability is optionality. Focus your writing and audience building efforts on places where you can take your posts and followers elsewhere, if you want. That’s your recipe for permanence on the ever-changing internet.
Programmatic exports
It’s now possible to send export event data to external services via webhook. For now, you can have Buttondown ping your webhook when an export is created, completed, or when an attempt fails. But if there are other export events that you want to track, let us know!
And now, on to 2025, when we plan to build and ship more archive themes, better automations and search, and (drum roll) dark mode!
HNY! ✨