Technologist Daniel Aleksandersen writes about a newsletter syndication system he has written. One of the itches he chose to scratch was the matter of being able to cull fake subscriptions which are problematic when commercial service charge per subscriber. Another was that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) made it more advantageous to self-host. Several other interesting capabilities stand out.
The email newsletter is managed and delivered by a purpose-built software I developed in October 2018. I wrote it because I wasn't happy with commercial offerings like MailChimp. I'd also reviewed self-hosted open-source options like phpList and found them lacking.
[...] I don't know what people want to read about. Some articles get really popular and other people just don't care about it. I'm always surprised by which articles get popular and which don't. I don't know what any individual reader might be interested in. I don't know what the majority of subscribers are interested in either.
To hedge my bets, and so that I don't have to worry about it, the article order in the newsletter is randomized for every recipient. This system allows me the freedom to just write what I want without thinking about how something might perform in the newsletter.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @02:41AM
Vote Libertarian Republican.
Kill the poor.
Take from the young and give to the old.
Fuck you, got mine, give me yours.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @03:36AM
big bulbous rigid cocks full of jizz
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @05:10AM
Your idea is intriguing to me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Signed, AC
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Appalbarry on Sunday December 01 2019, @06:23AM
To hedge my bets, and so that I don't have to worry about it, the article order in the newsletter is randomized for every recipient. This system allows me the freedom to just write what I want without thinking about how something might perform in the newsletter.
In days of yore we had a thing called an editor, who had a good understanding of the readership, who decided what was worthy of publication, and who decided what merited being "above the fold."
Now we have Facebook, which publishes anything and everything, with no regard for quality or accuracy, and which shuffles random crap based on some random algorithm.
Guess which will still be around in a hundred years?
(Score: 5, Informative) by jb on Sunday December 01 2019, @06:54AM (8 children)
Yes, something that only works through a web site probably won't be ideal for a mailing list.
But what's wrong with good old majordomo? Rock solid for decades and still going strong.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday December 01 2019, @12:09PM (7 children)
I've used Dada Mail [dadamailproject.com] for years for several mailing lists, and it works like a champ and provides all the functionality this guy claims that MailChimp doesn't have. However, there are some caveats that make it less useful for high volume lists:
1. Free (no support contract) version only allows three lists and <= 500 subscribers
2. Some limitations on management via CLI
That said, as jb correctly pointed out [soylentnews.org], majordomo is a viable alternative. As are Mailman [gnu.org] and LISTSERV [lsoft.com].
There are a bunch of others too. This is *another* long-solved problem (LISTSERV debuted in 1986), and I'm not sure why Aleksandersen didn't just use an existing implementation, or hack one up to add any missing functionality.
TFS bills him as a "technologist,"* but it seems to me that this guy isn't as knowledgeable as he claims to be, and/or considers anything more than a couple years old to be obsolete.
I'd be interested to see his code (no link provided in TFS *or* TFA) to see what it actually does. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he just cobbled together the work of others (with scripting and possibly some interface code) and now claims that he "wrote" a "new" mailing list manager.
Perhaps I should create my own blog too, and tout all the "custom" software I "wrote" by combining the work of others for my own purposes. Then I could be a famous "technologist" too!
*For the Poe's Law challenged among you, the quotes throughout this comment denote sarcasm.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 01 2019, @01:19PM (6 children)
I'm glad it works for you, and if I ever started a mailserver operation I think I would also fall within those limits (3 lists, less than 500 subscribers) - and, it makes sense - once you get up over 500 subscribers you've got advertising / monetization potential.
Having said that... anything that's locked down like that is instantly repulsive to me. How long before they alter the deal? What is your option other than to pray they do not alter the deal further?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday December 01 2019, @02:05PM
An excellent point. I don't really have those concerns, although I find it annoying that they set any limits.
If I really cared, I would move to another platform.
That said, while I agree that there's a potential for issues, given the free/premium (although that's not unusual for lots of different software -- think Kubernetes, Docker and lots of other platforms) tiers. At the same time, Dada Mail is open source [github.com] and is pretty much all written in Perl.
My use case is pretty minimal (fewer than 100 users on a single mailing list, with very little in the way of traffic), but I imagine that if these folks tried to close the source and/or further restrict the number of lists/users, someone would fork the code and likely remove *all* restrictions.
So even if the publishers tried to do so, I imagine I could roll my own and remove any limitations myself if I cared. Which I really don't.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday December 01 2019, @02:09PM (4 children)
I forgot to mention that I brought up Dada Mail primarily because it (even the free version) provides *every single feature* (and more) that the author of TFA was complaining about.
I'd never heard of Daniel Aleksandersen before, and now that I have I'm singularly unimpressed. If I hear about him again, I'll likely just ignore anything he has to say.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 01 2019, @08:37PM (3 children)
Fair enough, but should you ever meet him in person, do be charitable. I was over 6 months into my Master's Thesis before I stumbled across LabView, which pretty much did everything I was doing in my thesis - albeit not for systolic-parallel processing targets, so there was that. Back in 1990 it was legitimately possible to do 6 months of diligent research and miss something as big as LabView hiding in plain sight.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday December 01 2019, @08:55PM (1 child)
I can see why you might think I'd be less than cordial.
Truth be told, I don't have anything against the guy personally. He's most likely a decent human being and I might well actually like him if we actually met.
Just because I found his article less than inspiring doesn't mean I wouldn't be friendly. I'm just not very interested in reading other things he's written/will write.
Even then, if someone whose opinion I trusted suggested I give a different piece by him a go, I wouldn't reject the idea out of hand.
I've been in similar situations as you mentioned as well, so I know the feeling.
That said, I don't think I was unduly harsh in my comment, especially because the entire article pretty much boiled down to:
1. I don't like MailChimp;
2. So I did *something* else;
3. I think my work is great, and it was easy too, but I'm not going to tell you anything about it.
It was the blog post equivalent of someone posting a photo of their half-eaten meal on Instagram, IMHO.
I don't really see why he needed a whole blog post for it, or even thought it was worth sharing. Perhaps to create additional content for his newsletter?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 01 2019, @10:55PM
See, that, right there - that's why 99% of the time I don't bother reading the linked articles / stories. Been there too many times, it's just not worth the investment.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @09:40PM
Good God, I hope you walked away from that Labview stuff. Labview is the Microsoft Access of that field. It allows you to quickly get something set up and running, but is a nightmare to do anything complicated, and even worse, is more of a nightmare to maintain and change it. Like Access, it was (and still is) the path of least resistance, but at least Microsoft never charged you a thousand dollars a year for software "maintenance".
I have a couple of colleagues who I've had to listen to their Stockholm Syndrome comments about, ok, yes, it sucks and limits you, but it is getting better!
Here's an AC tip for the newly initiated, free of charge since it is "Cyber Monday": if you are in your third year of paying maintenance for NI support, do yourself a favor and bite the bullet and spend the modest amount of time and money it takes to just do it the right way rather than suffer a death of a thousand cuts. Cripes, you can probably do that just off of the money you save buying a non-NI-branded DAQ card and using Python libraries (see, you don't even need to write it in C).