Updates from May
Buttondown, but in your own language
Cześć! Goedemorgen! Bom dia! Buttondown finally has localization! We have a lot of non-English-speaking users and, after a few years of promises, you can change your newsletter’s primary language from the Settings page.
Click the Locale dropdown and choose one of the eight languages we currently support. We plan to add more and invite you to request your own. Head over to the dedicated localization page for more details about how it works and what it affects.
Get data about archival clicks
This is actually two updates rolled into one. First, if you have turned on click tracking (available to all Buttondown users via the Tracking page), you will be able to track clicks on the posts in your archives.
And alongside that, you can now add ?do_not_track=true to the end of any URL to turn off tracking for only that link. Neat! Pop over to the announcement if you want a refresher on how we handle tracking.
From the blog
Once upon a time, the United States Postal Service tried to convince Americans to pay to have their emails printed and dropped in their recipient’s mailboxes. It’s an absolutely bonkers story involving Defense Department memos, government monopolies, and a truckload of spam.
But, hey, on a happier note, E-COM was soon followed by Nathaniel Borenstein’s MIME protocol. He built it because he wanted to receive pictures of his grandchildren over email and stumbled into making multilingual messaging along the way.
Part of what makes email standards so heartwarming (yes, you read that right!) is how collaborative and crowd-sourced they are. And while Markdown formatting wasn’t the product of an RFC or a conversation among members of the Internet Engineering Task Force, it was a platform-agnostic and grassroots effort. Huzzah!
Finally, since Buttondown continues to grow its userbase of creators and builders, we threw together some thoughts and opinions on how to announce your product via newsletter. If you have any fun or encouraging stories of launching something since joining the platform, reply to this email. We want to hear about it!
Other stuff
Buttondown now has its very own, beautiful CLI (Command Line Interface). Read the docs for instructions on installing it and start playing with it!
If what gets measured gets improved, your complaint and permanent failure rates just moved in the right direction. Our newest deliverability stats help you get to the bottom of what isn’t working.
We rolled out a quality-of-life improvement to the “Send draft” window this month, hopefully making it easier to see at a glance where your newsletter is headed.
Exporting your list got a little easier this month. You can now exclude certain datapoints, preview the export before executing it, and download either CSV or JSON.
This month’s integration is Are.na, with options to port your Buttondown newsletters over there automatically.
SimpleAnalytics is now super, well, simple to connect to your newsletter. Go to your Integrations settings to set it up!