
Show HN: Automatically turn your blog posts into emails for your readers - fiiv
https://blogsend.io/?ref=hackernews
======
darrenwestall
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.

~~~
juoemeka
t's not the same technology. Job page doesn't have RSS. It will be hard to
read and get an update from different agencies/company career page.

~~~
darrenwestall
That’s an easy one to solve by running it through fetchrss or feedity.

------
fiiv
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 :)

~~~
catchmeifyoucan
Do you store the list of emails per blog?

~~~
fiiv
Yes, I do! At present they're not exportable though. I think one part of the
product that's nice in that way is that as a subscriber, you know you don't
need to think about your email getting spammed - communicating with
subscribers is only done as a post is published.

~~~
vincentmarle
> At present they're not exportable though.

You may want to think this one more through. As a publisher, I would
definitely be in the market for your product but the mailing list is the most
valuable (and expensive) data set I will be working on for years, and to have
it not exportable in the case that you might go out of business or if I decide
to use another product is a definite showstopper for me.

~~~
fiiv
That makes sense!

Just out of curiosity, what size is your blog?

I spoke to several blog owners of various sizes. The smaller ones tended to
not care about this, but indeed the bigger ones took more of an interest in
the actual emails they collect. Just wondering if you'd fall into one of these
categories.

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Johnny555
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.

~~~
wingerlang
Why don't you clean your inbox and setup some filters? I'd say 99% of the
emails I get is relevant. Blog posts from blogs I actually signed up for is
great to get. And if you start to dislike it it's 1 click to unsubscribe.

------
creative_ape
Here is our version of this concept, except it also works with your social
media accounts: [https://www.gibbonwire.com](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/](https://www.gibbonwire.com/about/faq/)

and our privacy policy:
[https://www.gibbonwire.com/about/privacy/](https://www.gibbonwire.com/about/privacy/)

~~~
fiiv
Good luck :)

------
aaronarduino
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.

~~~
fiiv
You're right, WP does have several plugins that do this, the most popular
being from providers like ConstantContact and Mailchimp. I think I'd expect a
few WP users but you're right, my target are probably people that are using
something like Jekyll.

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nate
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...](https://cl.ly/709c92e9ca7b/Image%202018-11-20%20at%2011.12.45%20AM.png)

Get this:

[https://cl.ly/eac5828099c5/Image%202018-11-20%20at%2011.13.2...](https://cl.ly/eac5828099c5/Image%202018-11-20%20at%2011.13.22%20AM.png)

~~~
fiiv
Oh no! I'll check it out! Could you message fiiv@blogsend.io and I can check
out the problem!

------
philistine
My blog is obviously published as an RSS feed but I also have a JSON feed
([https://jsonfeed.org](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?

~~~
fiiv
Hello!

Looking at the spec, it appears to differ from RSS/Atom in very small ways
(besides being in a different data format). It would be pretty trivial to
build in support for this.

It's difficult to find usage stats since searching for "json feed"
unfortunately gives a whole lot of unrelated things!

I think if I can find a paying client that wants it, I will build this in.
Wanna be the first? ;)

------
AndrewOMartin
Does it also do emails to blog posts? I have a number of carefully considered
emails I'd like to publish.

~~~
Alex3917
We have a site to do that,
[https://www.fwdeveryone.com](https://www.fwdeveryone.com)

In addition to sharing on social, it also supports embedding email threads
directly within Reddit threads, Medium posts, etc., e.g.:

[https://medium.com/to-the-best-of-our-knowledge/were-not-
ok-...](https://medium.com/to-the-best-of-our-knowledge/were-not-
ok-2b87b413dee2)

Here are some video tutorials showing more functionality:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJAEYmnEjIu4--
bpq5LSK...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJAEYmnEjIu4--
bpq5LSKZ9LS44po_NUx)

And we'll have a Gmail add-on submitted to Google within the next couple
weeks, so hopefully that will be live by the end of the year. (Since I know a
lot of HN folks have reservations about OAuth and have been asking for another
way to upload content.)

------
StavrosK
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?

~~~
fiiv
Yes indeed, MC does this pretty decently. I tried it myself, but I found the
product is very much catering to marketers. Which is fine, of course, but for
people that only want this functionality, it seems like overkill.

Blogsend is meant as a much simpler, more focused alternative. This is all it
does, and the features to be added in the roadmap are almost exclusively to
help bloggers, not marketers or a general audience.

~~~
StavrosK
I see, that makes sense, thanks!

