Things we love: Weekly link digest emails
A few weeks ago, I started to hear some buzz on Twitter for a new site called JavaScript Weekly. It’s a simple digest of notable articles from the past week curated by Peter Cooper.
This kind of site is fairly common: a link blog or “tumblog.” What makes this site interesting is that it’s not a blog — it’s an email newsletter.
A simple, smart way to deliver content.
This is such a great way to deliver relevant content to an interested audience. I immediately thought, “I could do that!” And if you keep up with articles and blog posts relevant to your business’s industry, I’ll bet you could too.
For example, if you collect links with a service like (the now nearly defunct) Delicious, Google Bookmarks or (my personal favorite) Pinboard, you’re already collecting a ton of great content that you could be sharing in interesting ways. Grab some of those links, add some brief descriptions and wear out that “Create a New Mailing” button, folks.
P.S. Here’s my collection of personal bookmarks in case you need some nerdy inspiration.
4 Responses to “Things we love: Weekly link digest emails”
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About the Author
Trey Piepmeier
When he's not wrangling code on Emma's User Experience team, you'll find Trey walking around Nashville and stopping every 50 meters or so to add a new location on Gowalla.
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Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
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At first I was skeptical of a JavaScript email newsletter as opposed to a blog, but I kept hearing about it, so I thought I would give JavaScript Weekly a try. I have to admit, that because it has such great content, I am far more likely to read JavaScript weekly than any of my RSS feeds.
How can we integrate this idea with Emma? I love this idea…I used to use FeedBlitz for this feature to automatically create newsletters from RSS feeds, but the interface was difficult. When will Emma have a blog –> newsletter feature?
Susannah, we’re always on the lookout for nifty new features to add to Emma, and we’ll add that to our queue of ideas.
However, the reason JavaScript Weekly is a success is because it’s curated, not because it’s automatically generated from an RSS feed. Cooper clearly does a great job collecting news for the week, but he’s successful because he carefully chooses the most high impact articles to share with his readers.
Lots of folks struggle with content, so social bookmarking is a great way to start collecting interesting things. And as I said in the post, if that’s something you’re already doing, why not take a closer look at what you’re reading and choose a few nuggets to share with your audience too?
Thanks for mentioning JavaScript Weekly here, Trey. High praise!
I think you nailed it with your last comment. I’ve been involved with curation in the developer community in various ways over the years (I run several sites too, including Ruby Inside, the most popular Ruby-related blog) and have a feel for the fine line between an annoying firehose and a seemingly-effortless “just right” collection of content.
Neither JavaScript Weekly and Ruby Weekly are created by a RSS->e-mail or similar convertor. Instead, I built a simple system that parses a special HTML-esque markup (basically just HTML with a few added tags to denote ‘items’) and works with some templates of my design to produce the raw HTML and plain text outputs I can paste into my e-mail provider of choice. I’ve put a screenshot of this setup here.