Reply to the replies
Reply to the replies
Hi,
Thank you all for the feedback. I like hearing from people about how great I am, please don’t stop! ;)
I received a number of questions and I thought it would be faster to answer them here:
- Yes
- Not really
- Once
- Yes
- Honestly, no.
- Interesting, thanks.
Hopefully this addresses those issues.
People mentioned an interest in seeing the script I wrote, and even though it is really not cleaned up or anything, I’ve put it on GitHub.
https://github.com/grugq/newsletter/blob/main/bttndwn.pyHow the Sausage is Made
Immediately after I send the newsletter I create a new note in Bear.app for the next one.
As I go about my day, reading twitter, browsing, talking with people, and so on, I make sure to save the URL for everything which looks interesting or amusing or relevant. When it is close to 20:00 I create the email with whatever I have, schedule it for 20:23, and then immediately start the next day’s note.
Why the sausage is made
The newsletter started because in early 2022 I created a Twitter group DM to share the tweets that I thought were good/interesting. I quickly realised that a group DM was a terrible place for collecting links etc, so I decided to make a newsletter.
I set out a small trial to see if I could maintain daily updates for a week. If that worked, I’d tell a few people about it and gauge the response. A few weeks later I made it public.
Since then I’ve managed to keep up a daily schedule (with some exceptions.) The trick is to have a habit of saving things when I notice them, not waiting for some sort of “newsletter writing time.”
That’s all the deep dark secrets of my newsletter. It’s a list of things I find interesting, from daily notes, and then I post it publicly so I can find it again.
Cheers,
—gq