Audience

Drafter is a feature I've had in the plans for Audience since I started it. Using the RSS feed from my blog be able to pull the content in and create the draft newsletter.

I want to then open the draft and add my own little intro or story and hit send.

The content of the newsletter is mostly done from my RSS feed, with links to the blog post I just published.

Store the RSS feed in the DB so I can run a timer against it and get new posts on the blog.

I spent a lot of time this week working on the create template functions for Audience. I think for now I'm going to scrap it and get rid of it for the moment.

The problem is I can't get it right that it gives the user a really good experience. It breaks the newsletter builder and some other features I have coming down the line.

Simple things would work fine but users never do the simple. I think for now the right decision for me is to scrap what I've been doing and see if I can work out a better way.

Getting the templates saved to the DB against the user and their site.

This will also make it easier for me to add templates to the system, next up being able to open these templates in the builder.

Designed the UI Flow for creating templates in Audience.

I'm building out the system to now allow users to load their own custom templates, to take the existing template and clone it.

The first step was to build out a table and the backend to store the templates.

When a subscriber confirms the email address, Audience can call an API endpoint and pass the email address. This lets me set their user account to confirmed in Audience itself.

It's a feature I've been thinking about for a while it means that Audience can verify the user signup and let your app know that they have verified so you can activate their account.

Saves hassle on furture projects and builds my mailing list at the same time. Feature is still in beta for the moment, I'll test it out on Audience itself with the trial users and see how it is.

Doing some planning around the next features that will be going into audience,

Templates - uploading your own email template, and custom changes to the basic template.
Drafter - Hook up your RSS feed to Audience, create a draft newsletter for you're new post.

Since it's launched it's not on the way anymore.

Removed the option to sign up to the waitlist from the about page, It now lets you sign up for a trial.

Audience is now launched, well it might have slipped out of MVP a few days ago, just took me a bit to finish writing the blog post.

A bit of a bug on the signups was setting the user type to beta not trial.