Hi HN! I made Blogsend.io.
It's a way for blog owners to handle emailing their readers automatically whenever they make a post. I built this because I actually needed it first, but decided to try it out as a product as well.
Technically it's not terribly complicated – it has a widget which collects emails of your subscribers and it listens to your RSS feed and emails those people when you post. The goal is to make it as hands-off and hassle-free as possible to email out your content to your readers.
Built it in Node.js and Postgres, with Bulma providing the CSS defaults. I vowed to move fast in this project and to that end I decided to stay away from frontend frameworks and build the old fashioned way, with <form> tags! It was actually super fun. I've had my hands on React, Vue, Angular and Ember before, and in all of them I actually never really felt as if it felt as natural as this approach.
Anyways, I'd love to hear any feedback you might have :)
Not to detract from the project, but is there much demand for this? Anything that's emailed to me is generally lost in my mailbox or purposely ignored... when I want to read a blog, I'll go to the blog.... I don't want more emails.
Here is our version of this concept, except it also works with your social media accounts: https://www.gibbonwire.com
plus we take privacy very seriously, which is an added bonus.
edit: here is a link to our FAQ: https://www.gibbonwire.com/about/faq/
and our privacy policy: https://www.gibbonwire.com/about/privacy/
Doesn't WordPress already do this? Not sure this is very helpful for WordPress users. Although, I do see the use for static blogs and those that do not already send emails when posts are published.
Dig it! But I'm clicking on Preview and getting a I need to subscribe?
https://cl.ly/709c92e9ca7b/Image%202018-11-20%20at%2011.12.4...
Get this:
https://cl.ly/eac5828099c5/Image%202018-11-20%20at%2011.13.2...
My blog is obviously published as an RSS feed but I also have a JSON feed (https://jsonfeed.org). Don't laugh, there are dozens of us. Dozens!
Considering you've already done the hard work of parsing RSS, do you plan to support JSON feeds at some point?
Does it also do emails to blog posts? I have a number of carefully considered emails I'd like to publish.
Nice project! I currently do the same with Mailchimp, I have a mailing list and they support creating newsletters from RSS. Does your project have advantages over that?
Have you considered the recruitment use case? Many staffing agencies advertise jobs on their website but don’t have the job alert functionality a job board would offer. If you turn this into a “alert me”, the next time they post a job matching the criteria you’ll email candidates for them. Same technology, just a different niche - one that I think will be more profitable.