Yay!!! I launched a newsletter!! In my yearly(ish) update fashion (last year I moved to Notion for a CMS), I’ve launched a new feature!

Drumroll please 🥁🥁🥁….

Blog update emails!

A very important goal of mine is to keep in touch with people as much as I can. I do this currently through a mix of instagram/imessage/twitter but a all in one solution seems like it could be a lot nicer.

I’m not oblivious to the pitfalls of what I could be falling into, but I’m extremely excited by email as a way to communicate with people.

I’ve recently adopted a dumb phone, trying to become less online and be more in the moment. This has definitely traded off with what I felt was my main way to communicate to my friends and keep them updated on my life—instagram stories/posts. With instagram being such an attention hog (reels + constant notifications), I honestly would prefer a less aggressive medium to talk to people.

Hence… Email! I like the idea of representing myself in more long form content + think that this could be a two birds with one stone moment. I want to have more of an online presence, and forcing myself to launch a blog with each newsletter will hopefully be a good way to do this.

I spent most of today trying to get this newsletter up and running (as well as fix some chrome webGPU bugs, might be in a future blog post), so I’ll talk a little bit about the technical details there.

Getting Newsletters up and Running

(refer to my blog post on getting notion to work as a CMS for a intro on how the blog works already)

This starts with the first problem of: How would you want newsletters to function in Notion?

In Substack there is a very intentional posting workflow, where you click a button to publish an article. Since I’m connecting my blog to notion, this is extremely different. The notion flow is not built on drafts + publishing, but instead continuous editing/knowledge curation. I’ve integrated my CMS to have a “publish” section of the database which decides which blog posts to show and which to hide + a continuous static regenerator for the shown sites.

This works well for me, but doesn’t lend well to notifications because there is no distinction between “newly published” pages and “old pages”.

The flow I decided on was a button in my notion database that sends a newsletter for that specific blog + modifiers so I can include some personalized info in the email body.

With a button + confirmation dialogue (plus an email prebody), I can have a fun workflow to send emails easily from within Notion without a complicated “new blog worker” running 24/7. Once I hooked that up to Sendgrid, I got working on my subscription page.

I wanted something funny + personal + noisy, so I opted for a rolling font button plus some hand drawn arrows on my remarkable.

Heres a really cute GIF that I like! I tried to personalize the subscription and emails as much as I could—hope everyone liked it! I also would love to hear anything cool in the replies, looking for fun feedback + conversations on what I write. I want the newsletter to feel very personal, so I’m trying to make unsubscription a reply email—unsure about how that comes off, might change that in the future.

Some things that I hope happen from this:

• More conversations about blogs I write
• Keeping in touch with people over long periods of time (without instagram)
• Being more online in the helpful way (working in public and building cool things)
• Getting better at writing!

Keep in mind, I’m trying to do a blog post every day in January with Jinglin, so you might get a daily emails in the near term if you do subscribe. jinglinli.substack.com