For some time now, I have aggregated various newsletters and other channels that point me to interesting articles and tools. I read these for a long time and often took a closer look at various tools. However, I was usually unable to use any of them immediately. An opportunity would often arise and I would remember that there was an article that I had read. And of course I couldn't find that article again. Great!
So the idea matured that I had to save the links in some form. But how? Bookmark managers have never worked for me, read-it-later tools have never made sense in my daily routines. So I started to pack the links into a weekly blog series. Nicely organized by category, tagged, and a short summary. What I really like: the data is in my repository, I have control over it at all times.
I wasn't sure how long I would be able to keep it up. The first small mileage with 5 weeks at a time worked, then 10 and finally 15 weeks. Plus, it wasn't really bothersome or annoying. I embedded reading, and in most cases catching up, into my daily routines, and the extra work with the weekly blog was hardly noticeable. I was quite happy with the content: good articles on web development and design, plus interesting tools. And so I wanted to go one step further: it might make sense to create my own newsletter from it.
It's my first newsletter ever. How to start? Do I use a marketing platform? But which one? Do I really need all of it? Do I just build everything I need myself? Conclusion: I built it myself: the existing platforms are very powerful, but also quite expensive when it comes to many emails or subscribers. And I don't need most of the features at all. But I wanted to be flexible and have an easy way to scale without multiplying costs. I will write another article about the tech stack itself, if it is of interest.
So here is my little newsletter: https://weeklyfoo.com. Curated, lean, free.
It's worth mentioning the tech stack I use to send out the newsletter because it's basically just two services: Cloudflare and AWS SES. The pricing of AWS SES to send out emails is unbeatable, and Cloudflare for the backend to manage subscribers because Cloudflare is amazing. If there's interest I can write a follow up post about the engineering part of my own small solution. Just let me know in the comments.