In time for the next issue of the newsletter on January 16th, we’ve set up a Substack account to give users another option to subscribe to the newsletter direct to their inbox:
A special thank you for the RSS feed that the tiddlywikinewsletter.tiddlyhost.com site provides via a github page. My current feed reader (NetNewsWire) was able to discover the feed via the HTML <link rel="alternate" ... metadata and added the URL to my collection of sites to check for me. This will no doubt help keep up with important TiddlyWiki developments when I neglect to visit here for a while. I had missed the details about adding resurgent RSS in the New Tiddlywiki Newsletter (Beta/Work-In-Progress) discussion. Well done @PaulH!
I will note that the RSS icon on the tiddlyhost site does not actually link to the feed, and the tooltip tells the user that it’s purpose is instead is to “send feed to github”, but the feed is discoverable by readers. Thank you!
You’re right, this can be confusing .. I made a slight tweak to the relevant tiddler to link to the rss feed instead of pushing the feed to github when the user is not logged in:
After 5 days we have 158 subscribers to the TiddlyWiki Newsletter, and the numbers are growing steadily. Congratulations to @PaulH – and to the community for making all the interesting things that he can report on.
We use a service called substack.com to host the newsletter. I didn’t know much about it beyond the fact that it is popular across many communities. Now that we’re using it in earnest I’m beginning to see that there might be some potential to use it to promote TiddlyWiki itself as well as the newsletter.
Substack’s business model at the moment is paid subscriptions: publishers can opt to “monetize” a publication such that readers must pay a small monthly charge, of which Substack gets a cut. Many writers report success in building large paid subscriber bases, and consequential income.
Now, I have absolutely no intention of monetizing the TiddlyWiki Newsletter. The opportunity we have is to take advantage of Substack’s infrastructure for driving paid subscriptions to instead drive our primary goal: the adoption of TiddlyWiki.
For example, Substack has a recommendation system that I discovered because we’ve received a recommendation from another Substack publication. It’s not clear whether individual readers can recommend a publication, or if it is just something that happens between publications. If we got more recommendations then we might expect Substack to be more likely to present us to their readers.
So, I think the call to action goes something like this:
Please try to get as many people as possible to sign up for the newsletter. Substack tries to track whether or not emails are actually opened and read, so it’s not sufficient to just sign up and then ignore the messages. We need people to open the newsletter and ideally click on links so that Substack can see that there is activity
Let’s figure out how recommendations work and try to get the recommendation count going up. Perhaps we could find a handful of existing Substack publications that are relevant to TiddlyWiki, and recommend them in the expectation that they will follow back
The other thing we need to do is to develop a boilerplate introductory paragraph that we use for each edition of the newsletter that helps to contextualise what’s going on for people whose first encounter with TiddlyWiki is via the newsletter.
For example:
Welcome to the 1,432th edition of the TiddlyWiki Newsletter. We are here to bring you the most interesting and relevant news from the community around the most popular note taking tool that you’ve never heard of. TiddlyWiki is unorthodox in its design and uncompromising in its respect for its users. Check it out at https://tiddlywiki.com/introduction
I just discovered the Tiddlywiki Newsletter on Substack has a RSS feed. https://tiddlywiki.substack.com/feed
I tried it using Feedbro and it worked instantly. I’ll mention it in the next newsletter.