Newsvember. Novembersletter. NaNeWriMo.

For two and a half decades, a mass psychosis descended upon writers the world over. They’d start November with an idea, write a thousand or two words every day, and emerge after Black Friday and Cyber Monday with a 50,000-word novel in their hands.

A novel idea, indeed.

NaNoWriMo—the original iteration, at least—is gone. But the idea, the concept of writing more than most of us think we can and then continuing to do that, every day, for longer than we think we can, would work just as well for something new: NaNeWriMo, or National Newsletter Writing Month. 

You could start a pop-up newsletter, just for the month, and write your heart out. You could write every day and fill up your newsletter queue, to have extra issues to tide you through the holiday and some other rainy days. Tired of digital? You could start a snail mail newsletter, and turn your newsletter into something people can actually hold this November. Or you could bring the spirit of giving forward into November, and coach a friend who you know has it in them to start a newsletter.

Come December, you’ll look back and might not have a novel in hand, but will have a lot more novel ideas in your newsletter to fuel it into the new year.

Buttondown and the art of simplification

While you were thinking about what to write next in your newsletter, we were thinking about how to make it easier for you to manage your newsletter. This month, we improved our keyboard navigation, so you can press tab to jump into a table and use ↑ and ↓ to navigate through rows of data, anywhere you see a list of things in Buttondown. We fixed a handful of screen reader issues, so it’s easier to skip to content, hear page titles on navigation, and get accessible names for buttons that previously only had icons.

And we cleaned up settings to make things easier to find. There’s no longer a Tracking page, with email tracking settings now living in the email settings and web analytics relocated to your archive settings. And we moved Email and Archives settings to the top-level navigation, and removed the now-extraneous Design folder. That should make it easier to find the settings when you need to tweak them.

This month we also:

• Added writing prompts for those days when you're staring at an empty email editor

• Added the ability to link to past email dispatches directly from the editor

• Made it easier to redirect your archives if you ever decide to move off Buttondown

France, once upon a time, gave everyone a terminal.

Email has, perhaps, been independently invented more than any other part of tech. It was invented in universities, on mainframes, in customized software that only sent messages inside one institution. It was codified into standards that the world promptly ignored and reinvented from first, simpler principles. And, in France, it was invented over and over again on the fledgling Minitel network that ruled French telecommunications for decades.

It all started with the French phone company’s goal of saving money printing phone books, and of increasing utilization of the phone system. It ended with France essentially giving a computer terminal away to every household that wanted one, and with one service after another inventing their own proprietary email-style messaging service.

Give people a computing device and, over and over again, what people want to do most is to talk to each other.

Here’s the full story, on the Buttondown blog: When France gave away terminals, and a dozen email services bloomed