Updates from June
Make all the mistakes you want in Test mode
Everyone sends an errant email eventually. Even engineers of email software (it’s Justin, hi). Well now those oopsies can go straight to your inbox instead of your subscribers’, thanks to Test Mode.
Click on the Settings sidebar, then the Danger Zone tab, and select Enable test mode to only send emails to the address you use to log into Buttondown. It’s great for checking personalization, previewing new designs, and generally preserving your reputation as a trustworthy sender.
Check out the Test mode documentation for more details.
Combine multiple RSS feeds into one
Really simple syndication, as RSS (sometimes) stands for, didn’t have a way to consolidate multiple feeds in a way that worked for RSS-to-email newsletters. So we built one. Technically, it’s an entirely separate thing over at rssrssrssrss.com, but it’s 100% free with zero login requirements.
Go to rssrssrssrss.com, drop in as many feed links as you want, copy the permalink it spits out, and paste that into your Buttondown RSS settings. Or head over to the GitHub page to see how it works.
From the blog
June was a busy month for the Buttondown blog. We published eight articles that, broadly speaking, fell into one of three categories: email history, newsletter inspiration, and helpful technical updates.
Before Slack and Discord (and ICQ!), email was the place for short, quick messages. To help users with chat-like inboxes, clients like Pine, Mutt, and later Gmail adopted keyboard shortcuts from a time before computers had mice. For fans of filtering and automating email, though, Eudora was and still is the standard bearer for power users.
Falling somewhere in between email history and newsletter inspiration, we tackled where email tracking got its start and how you might approach it in your newsletter. Might being the operative word there. It’s not our place to prescribe the “right” way to set up your operation. But that’s not to say that we don’t have suggestions for non-scammy ways to grow your audience or advice for building an email course.
While you can ignore our advice all you want (cries into inbox), you cannot neglect guidance from email service providers like the recent updates from Orange, one of the largest ESPs in Europe.
Finally, we wrote a little about django-rq-cron, a tool we built for handling tasks at scheduled times and recurring intervals. It’s worth checking out even if your cron jobs all work exactly the way you want. If you don’t know what a cron job is, well, uh, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Other stuff
To protect you all from yourselves, deleting a bunch of subscriber and emails at once now requires retyping a random 3-word phrase.
Our brand new Playground lets anyone mess around with our newsletter editor to see how it feels to drive. Take it for a spin.
Tell Buttondown to skip RSS items older than a day when updating your feed, thanks to a new toggle in your Feeds settings.
As a feature title, subscriber autonomy was a little too cute and memorable. So we’re renaming it Portal and have added an option for subscribers to change their email address.
The cake was a lie but this is not: Portal now also includes a section for readers to create or update referral links to your newsletter (if you have referrals turned on).
And then there were two! Design settings now have separate pages for both Email design and Archives design.