I gave up looking for such service a while ago, instead I just used twit2rss or the like (everyone with a newsletter is also on twitter it seems) and emailed the website suggesting an RSS feed in the future. Good to know it exists now.
Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds
81–90 of 114 posts
Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds
#82As a guy who runs a newsletter with a few thousand subscribers, I'm supportive of this idea. In fact, I put a lot of work into my RSS feeds knowing that people like this would exist. http://feed.tedium.co/ (Using FeedPress, if you're curious.) I see it less as killing the newsletter, and more as giving people options.
I just checked out your site and uBlock blocked 27 requests and noted that loading the page involves 11 domains. Do you have any insight into what's being blocked and why so many domains are being accessed?
Hey there, I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. (Sorry I didn't see this sooner—I was keeping an eye on the thread just in case I got any comments.)
I'm using Ghostery on my machine rather than uBlock, and on the front page, I count eight items—standard social fare like Pinterest and AddThis, along with some advertising-related stuff like Skimlinks (I use some affiliate marketing, and am transparent about this.)
Beyond Google Analytics, one tool that I in fact do use specifically to track things is HubSpot's free LeadIn service, which mostly exists to tell me how people end up subscribing to the newsletter.
But on the article page, it's showing 46. Two things are different there: One, I have a single Google AdSense ad, which I only added a few weeks ago because I was seeing some traffic surges, and second, I have Disqus advertising turned on.
Just for kicks, I commented out Disqus for a second, and reloaded the page. That 46 number went down to 15. I'm assuming that if I turned off the single Google ad I use, that 15 would go back down to 8.
So there's your answer. Disqus is shoving a ton of ad trackers onto my users. I should really turn that off—I'm not making that much on it anyway.
(As for the number of domains used, I will point out a couple things: I'm using a font family that's not through Google, I appear to be using a third-party jQuery, and I'm using Cloudinary for image hosting—the latter because I use a lot of GIFs.)
Edit: For the sake of comparison, I loaded a couple of other pages to see how many trackers they had. The front page of Mediaite.com had 59, while an average article page had 81. Pitchfork.com (which doesn't have comments) had 22 on its front page and 20 on its article pages. And Washington Post had 17 on its front page, 42 on its article pages.
Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds
#83Tangential question here - can anyone comment on the recent-ish proliferation(explosion) of sites thats float an HTML 5 light box a few seconds after the page loads asking people to "Sign up now for our newsletter!" It's a pretty obnoxious practice. Newsletters aren't new of course but there seems to be a very enthusiastic renewed interest in them. Does anyone know why?
Two reasons I've heard, but haven't tested out personally yet: 1) The pop up results in higher conversions (people actually filling out the email address field and hitting "subscribe") 2) The action of "closing" the modal popup confirms that the viewer of the page is probably a real human and that they genuinely made some kind of movement on the page (scrolling slightly, moving the mouse off the window, etc). This is…
Thanks for the response.
In regards to number 1 I would be very surprised for that to be true simply because these pages are asking people to sign up often before a user has had time to read the first couple of sentences in the opening paragraph. I guess this is the part that drives me nuts is that they don't give you time to read the content before asking so how would someone even make an informed decision before giving out their email address?
Interesting about number 2.
Is there still not an extension to block this HTML element?
Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds
#84Tangential question here - can anyone comment on the recent-ish proliferation(explosion) of sites thats float an HTML 5 light box a few seconds after the page loads asking people to "Sign up now for our newsletter!" It's a pretty obnoxious practice. Newsletters aren't new of course but there seems to be a very enthusiastic renewed interest in them. Does anyone know why?
Two reasons I've heard, but haven't tested out personally yet: 1) The pop up results in higher conversions (people actually filling out the email address field and hitting "subscribe") 2) The action of "closing" the modal popup confirms that the viewer of the page is probably a real human and that they genuinely made some kind of movement on the page (scrolling slightly, moving the mouse off the window, etc). This is…
For 2, a less annoying arrangement might be to make sure the most important content continues past the fold, forcing anyone reading to scroll.
Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds
#85Great job on the project! I had this exact same idea about a week ago and put it on my Trello.
Will definitely be taking a deep dive into your website for inspiration. Congratulations on shipping!
Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds
#86I personally prefer RSS over mailed newsletters. And was expecting that newsletters will eventually die. I was wrong. Not sure why they didn't died and actually grow more popular, but IMHO RSS is probably too complicated for regular Joe, so they probably not even know RSS exists. I'm only subscribed to newsletter when RSS is not an option, like js weekly, android weekly... But wish I can read those in digg/reader too…
It started when FB started to ask for money. People built huge following on social media and overnight the work was destroyed.
You can "own" email list, but not your FB followers.
Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like Usenet :) RSS is probably easier to layer on top of those new fangled HTTP-over-P2P networks like IPFS. Heck, I remember proposals for combining RSS and BitTorrent, so an RSS feed could be spread via BitTorrent, with incremental updates being applied, and with each entry containing BitTorrent magnet links. This was proposed as a distributed way to provide podcasts ("podcatching"). Not sure if it got imple…
NNTP is one of the most underrated protocols. It's a distributed superset of email + RSS + twitter.
There are parts of it that have aged really badly, though. I was working on an NNTP-related project last year. Article numbers and threading are a bit crappy. The conflation of messages and commands (like cancel) also sat rather uncomfortably with me.
I was impressed with it as a piece of history, but more thorough exposure left me with a much decreased interest in building a system on it. More modern approaches to pubsub feel more natural (and are also more fun to work with!)
Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds
#88For those who used to use Google Reader I can recommend www.netvibes.com
Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds
#89Maybe we need to star with: Revive the RSS readers! Then move to killing the newsletters.
Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just checked out your site and uBlock blocked 27 requests and noted that loading the page involves 11 domains. Do you have any insight into what's being blocked and why so many domains are being accessed?
Hey there, I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. (Sorry I didn't see this sooner—I was keeping an eye on the thread just in case I got any comments.) I'm using Ghostery on my machine rather than uBlock, and on the front page, I count eight items—standard social fare like Pinterest and AddThis, along with some advertising-related stuff like Skimlinks (I use some affiliate marketing, and am transparent about…
I really appreciate you taking the time to check into this. The weight of the Disqus ads is a little surprising. Really interesting answer though, thanks.