It’s time to change around Monash Research’s mailing lists
Email delivery of posts has been screwed up; multiple people tell me they haven’t gotten their email for months. (In the future, please tell me of such difficulties!) So it’s time for a change, and I’m asking for your advice as to what you’d suggest for our mailing list.
Yes, I’m asking via a blog post, even thought the core problem is that people who want to see my posts via e-mail aren’t getting them. Please work with me on this anyway. 🙂
My two basic questions are:
- What should be the frequency of delivery? To date, it’s been nightly (at least in theory).
- What delivery technology should be used? To date, it’s been FeedBlitz.
1. The nightly scheduling has been an artifact of an RSS-to-email link that no longer seems stable. So I’m thinking of just manually pasting each post into a list email, in which case:
- Posts could be sent without delay.
- Every post would be delivered by separate mail. (As opposed to having only one post per night be mailed, while others just get linked to.)
It’s a bit more work for me, but probably nothing dire. Does lower latency sound good to everybody? 🙂
2. The main technical options seem to be:
- Free services oriented to discussion lists, such as Yahoo Groups, but set to announce-only. These have very basic functionality.
- Commercial services oriented to marketing email lists, such as Aweber or MailChimp. Does anybody have favorable or unfavorable experience with particular services? Most vendors surely use one or another, but it’s tough to guess which they’ve selected just based on their
spam and pabuluminformative communications, given the customizability those services provide.
Any thoughts would be most welcomed.
3. And while I’m at it — what I should I do for social/sharing buttons? Presumably, if I included buttons that made it easy for you to tweet links to my posts, submit them to Hacker News, etc., more of you would do so. Which specific options would you like to use?
- Twitter?
- LinkedIn?
- Google +?
- Facebook?
- Slashdot?
- Hacker News?
- dzone?
- Digg?
Anything else? I’d like to omit the more dubious possibilities, as offering everything could be a lot of clutter …
Comments
4 Responses to “It’s time to change around Monash Research’s mailing lists”
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Hello Curt,
I use my email mainly for work purposes, so I minimize any news or blogs sent to my address. Yours is one of the blogs I check frequently for updates and I’ll keep doing that proactively.
Not quite the feedback you were looking for I know, but I hope this helps.
Best regards,
Al D.
I can recommend Google Groups, which is a free service oriented to discussion lists. I am a member of a Google Group that has sent me thousands of messages in the past few years. It has worked very well.
Google Groups gives each user the choice of receiving each message when it is submitted or digests periodically. Thus, Google Groups leaves the frequency of delivery up to each recipient. I selected the lowest latency choice and have been happy with that choice.
With regard to social/sharing buttons, I use Google+ most often because it allows me to share with (or bother) only the circles for which I think the item is relevant. I use Twitter for things of general interest, which is much less likely for Monash Research. I would consider using a LinkedIn button. I don’t use Facebook.
I use Bloglines to keep up to date with DBMS2.
I am trying to schedule most of mailings into daily or weekly digests, but in case of your posts – single posts via e-mails are ok.
G+, LinkedIn and DZone would be my shares of choice.
Best,
-Vitaliy
Fix it the old school way with Linux, Python and a Vi editor. No wonder all these startups fail, no one knows how to code anymore.