Tyler Hallada - Blog

When my beloved Google Reader was discontinued in 2013, I stopped regularly checking RSS feeds. Apparently, I am not alone. It seems like there’s a new article every month arguing either that RSS is dead or RSS is not dead yet. Maybe RSS will stick around to serve as a cross-site communication backbone, but I don’t think anyone will refute that RSS feeds are declining in consumer use. Facebook, Twitter, and other aggregators are where people really go. However, I noticed that I still follow some small infrequent blogs through mailing lists that they offer. I’m really happy to see an email sign up on blogs I like, because it means I’ll know when they post new content in the future. I check my email regularly unlike my RSS feeds.

Even though I’m sure my blog is still too uninteresting and unheard of to get many signups, I still wanted to know what it took to make a blog mailing list. RSS is super simple for website owners, because all they need to do is dump all of their content into a specially formatted XML file, host it, and let RSS readers deal with all the complexity. In my blog, I didn’t even need a Jekyll plugin. Email is significantly more difficult. With email, the website owner owns more of the complexity. And, spam filters make it unfeasible to roll your own email server. A couple people can mark you as spam, and BAM: now you are blacklisted and you have to move to a new IP address. This is why most people turn to a hosted service like Mailchimp. Though, I was dissatisfied with that because of the high costs and measly free tier.

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) deals with all the complexity of email for you and is also cheap. In fact, it’s free unless you have more than 62,000 subscribers or post way more than around once a month, and even after that it’s a dime for every 1,000 emails sent. Frankly, no one can really compete with what Amazon is offering here.

Okay, so that covers sending the emails, but what about collecting and storing subscriptions? SES doesn’t handle any of that. I searched around a long time for something simple and free that wouldn’t require me setting up a server ¹. I eventually ended up going with Sendy because it looked like a well-designed product exactly for this use case that also handled drafting emails, email templates, confirmation emails, and analytics. It costs a one-time fee of $59 and I was willing to fork that over for quality software. Especially since most other email newsletter services require some sort of monthly subscription that scales with the number of emails you are sending.

Unfortunately, since Sendy is self-hosted, I had to add a dynamic server to my otherwise completely static Jekyll website hosted for free on Github Pages. You can put Sendy on pretty much anything that runs PHP and MySQL including the cheap t2.micro Amazon EC2 instance type. If you are clever, you might find a cheaper way. I already had a t2.medium for general development, tinkering, and hosting, so I just used that.

There are many guides out there for setting up MySQL and Apache, so I won’t go over that. But, I do want to mention how I got Sendy to integrate with nginx which is the server engine I was already using. I like to put separate services I’m running under different subdomains of my domain hallada.net even though they are running on the same server and IP address. For Sendy, I chose list.hallada.net ². Setting up another subdomain in nginx requires creating a new server block. There’s a great Gist of a config for powering Sendy using nginx and FastCGI, but I ran into so many issues with the subdomain that I decided to use nginx as a proxy to the Apache mod_php site running Sendy. I’ll just post my config here:

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;

    server_name list.hallada.net;

    root /var/www/html/sendy;
    index index.php;

    location /l/ {
        rewrite ^/l/([a-zA-Z0-9/]+)$ /l.php?i=$1 last;
    }

    location /t/ {
        rewrite ^/t/([a-zA-Z0-9/]+)$ /t.php?i=$1 last;
    }

    location /w/ {
        rewrite ^/w/([a-zA-Z0-9/]+)$ /w.php?i=$1 last;
    }

    location /unsubscribe/ {
        rewrite ^/unsubscribe/(.*)$ /unsubscribe.php?i=$1 last;
    }

    location /subscribe/ {
        rewrite ^/subscribe/(.*)$ /subscribe.php?i=$1 last;
    }

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080/sendy/;
    }
}

Basically, this proxies all of the requests through to Apache which I configured to run on port 8080 by changing the Listen directive in /etc/apache2/ports.conf.

I also had to add RewriteBase /sendy to the end of the .htcaccess file in the sendy directory (which, for me, was in /var/www/html/sendy). This basically forces Sendy to use urls that start with http://list.hallada.net instead of http://list.hallada.net/sendy which I thought was redundant since I am dedicating the whole subdomain to sendy.

A perplexing issue I ran into was that Gmail accounts were completely dropping (not even bouncing!) any emails I sent to them if I used my personal email tyler@hallada.net as the from address. I switched to tyhallada@gmail.com for the from address and emails went through fine after that ³. The issue seems unresolved as of this post.

Lastly, I needed to create a form on my website for readers to sign up for the mailing list. Sendy provides the HTML in the UI to create the form, which I tweaked a little and placed in a Jekyll includes template partial that I could include on both the post layout and the blog index template. I refuse to pollute the internet with yet another annoying email newsletter form that pops up while you are trying to read the article, so you can find my current version at the bottom of this article where it belongs ⁴.

All in all, setting up a mailing list this way wasn’t too bad except for the part where I spent way too much time fiddling with nginx configs. But, I always do that, so I guess that’s expected.

As for the content of the newsletter, I haven’t figured out how to post the entirety of a blog post into the HTML format of an email as soon as I commit a new post yet. So, I think for now I will just manually create a new email campaign in Sendy (from an email template) that will have a link to the new post, and send that.