Hello! I hope your October was lovely; I was fortunate enough to spend two weeks traveling in Paris and Tuscany for my honeymoon, and despite all of that I still managed to find time for shipping some great new changes to Buttondown.

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Hello hello! I hope you had a lovely June. (To my American readers: a belated happy Fourth of July; to my non-American readers, I hope you enjoyed an otherwise peaceful Tuesday!)

What's new

Goodness gracious, June was an exciting month for new features! We launched an absolute slew of stuff to improve the core Buttondown experience:

• Custom-built share images so that your web archives get more clicks and attention on your social media platform of choice.
• Support for customizing your email and subscriber lists to show just the data you care about, making it easy to stay up to date and get your work done.
• A new weekly report to let you keep tabs of incoming subscribers at a glance.
• Last but not least (okay, maybe least), RSS analytics so you can see how many folks are subscribing via apps like Feedbin or NewsBlur.

Hello hello! I hope you had a lovely May.

I'm writing this email by the James River, where the light breeze and the early afternoon sun could not make for better companions. What better weather to talk about newsletters?

What's new

The headline feature — the single largest improvement to Buttondown this year — is full-fledged support for automations. At long last, you can compose drip sequences, welcome sequences, autoresponders, and all sorts of powerful things without having to drop down the API or Zapier.

Hello hello! I hope you had a lovely April.

What's new

No big headline features this month, as I spend most of my time building out automations. (Interested in giving them a test run? Reply to this email!)

Instead, lots of small-ish improvements that I'm quite proud of:

Hello hello! I hope your March went well, and your Q2 (if you subscribe to such corporate notions) is off to a lovely start.

What's new

The headline feature: we rebuilt our analytics page. It's quite nice, now — you've got conversion rates, page views, CSV export, pretty graphs, 5x performance improvements, and more. (There's still some stuff we want to ship — but this new iteration is so good that we couldn't wait!)

Beyond that, a whole bunch of small stuff to make your newsletter-ing experience even better:

February 2023 updates

What’s new

Buttondown’s two big new features in February:

• You can now send surveys to your subscribers to learn more about what their interests are, collect feedback, discuss favorite foods — pretty much anything you want!
• You can now invite friends or colleagues to your newsletter to collaborate, analyze, and help you run your newsletter. Gone are the days of sharing passwords!

(You’re receiving this email because you signed up for Buttondown, a tool for growing and sending newsletters. No longer interested? Click here to unsubscribe!)

What’s new

Buttondown’s gotten quite a bit better in January:

• You can now wire up an RSS feed to your newsletter and automatically publish new emails, either with each post or on a weekly/monthly cadence.
• You can now add alt text and HTML classes to images you upload without having to ‘drop down’ to HTML.
• A lot (a lot!) of small stuff: the email list page is three times as fast, the analytics page is twice as fast, the Zapier integration has better error messages, you can now more easily choose a share image for your emails, you can now execute bulk actions from the API, and there’s like seventeen other things that I’m forgetting I’m sure.

(Hello! It’s been around eight months since I’ve sent out a monthly newsletter. If you’re not interested in Buttondown any more, no worries — click here to unsubscribe.)

New features

Subscriber cohort analysis

👋 Hi! Remember me? I’m Justin, the guy who writes about Buttondown.

September was a lovely month in Buttondown-land. I bounced around on a handful of different fun projects (and even did some marketing, the bane of my existence, to boot!)

Confirmation reminders

If you’re using Buttondown’s feature to get folks to confirm their email address, it’s now a little bit easier to make sure the funnel of folks confirming stays flowing.

Howdy! I hope you’re doing well. After a reticent start to the season, Seattle’s summer is truly underway — I am in the process of moving into my very own house (and by “in the process” I mean “creating a Google Doc with various odds and ends that need to be done and bar carts that need to be purchased and stocked”), and air conditioning and a surplus of tower fans is top of mind. I have been biking a lot; I have a terrible farmer’s tan.

There has been lots of administrative work on Buttondown that probably does not concern you: I am setting up a new way to answer feedback & support concerns (so if emails from yours truly look different, that is why); I am setting up metrics dashboard in a foolish attempt at maturity; I am cleaning up lots of code.

Here’s what does concern you: your emails, as voluminous and lovely as ever, are getting delivered faster and more accurately than any point in 2019. I’ve done a lot of boring (well, I find it fascinating) backend work to reduce your time-to-inbox by around 30%; it’s still far too slow, and there is work to be done there, of which I will keep you apprised.

Howdy! After a month off (from writing a monthly update, that is, not running Buttondown 😉) I have a couple quick updates I’d love to share with you.

Mailchimp archive importing

If you migrated over to Buttondown from Mailchimp, you either had to deal with a very janky migration from yours truly or just go without. I’m happy to announce that there’s a much cleaner, elegant archive import process — you can access it from your settings page.

Support for drafts in the API and Zapier

Welcome to May! I wrote this from two places:

1. the lounge of Seattle’s Sorrento Hotel, counting down the minutes until Silent Reading Party (a truly insufferable city tradition that I love dearly) begins;
2. the promenade of Cal Anderson Park, on a particularly sunny Saturday.

I wrote last month that April was going to be filled with small and necessary work, a nice step back before diving into some renewed projects.  It was exactly that!

Buttondown has been buggy the past few months.  It feels bad to admit that, but it's true; the "bugs" tag in my issue tracker has been growing wider and more bulbous, and it feels good (and, frankly, necessary) to dedicate some time tackling it.

Howdy, friends! I’m writing this belated update having just arrived back in Seattle from a week of leisure and wine in Paris. Apologies for the sluggishness in responding to emails and DMs; rest assured, I’ll be spending the next few days getting back to folks.

What’s new

March was a big month for Buttondown.

I shipped three things that have folks have been pining for for months:

Hi, friends!  This was a great month in Buttondownsville (Buttondownia?).  I was able to take care of a huge number of paper-cut issues and build out some exciting infrastructure for the next few months.

Even nicer analytics graphs

Look at these new graphs!  They’re beautiful.  They’re wonderful.  They’re straight-up_lovely_.  And they are all thanks to the c3 package, which I’m slowly migrating our visualizations to.  (Sorry, .)

Welcome to February, y'all! Seattle saw its first snow of 2019 last night, which is always an event worth celebrating. I'm writing this from a friend's couch and watching a very slow Super Bowl (and a very mediocre Maroon Five performance.)

Some new stuff from January:

Rich text copy/paste

Howdy! Sorry this is getting out so late — June has been a fun and lovely month, and sometimes I forget to send things.

Here’s what’s new this month! (Er, last month.)

Analytics

Howdy! April had a lot of stuff — 184 commits, to be exact! — and a lot of that was laying groundwork and paying off technical debt, as well as some general performance improvements and housecleaning. Still, we've got three exciting things to share:

YouTube embeds

Adding a YouTube video to your email is as easy as dropping in the link, as you see above. (More context: email clients don't support actual videos, so what we're doing here is generating a thumbnail of the video, adding a play button on top, and making it a link to the actual video!)

Hey there! March has had a bunch of stuff arrive in the ol' Buttondown codebase, mostly on the smaller side of things. Here's the quick laundry list:

Sort your subscribers

Coming shortly after publishing this — sorting by tags, as well!

Howdy and Happy New Year! We had a quiet but productive start to 2018; I'm pumped to share what we've been up to.

Link analytics

You can now gain insight into exactly what links folks are clicking on and reading!