There and back again

12 Mar 2021 — 3 min read

We skipped last week in order to move back to the Revue newsletter platform. I hope it’s a lesson in not being afraid to explore opportunities and to feel comfortable saying ‘Nope!’ and resetting things if it just doesn’t feel right.

I think it’s also a lesson in realising that you just can’t ‘demo’ something and know if it’s right for you. Sometimes you need to commit, and through that commitment the lessons are learned.

I’ve also learned a lot about all the HTML cruft that some newsletter tools generate invisibly under these emails. Most are built to help a marketer send a pretty message, but the message is pretty compact. Not so good when you’re trying to share a bunch of curated links to interesting things and most of the data budget (102kb in Gmail) is eaten up by code instead of words.

I’m sure there’s a metaphor there for all the ways we underestimate the invisible costs in our work routines. And how much brain space we win back when we keep it simple.

I’d been hoping to launch a really cool reader referral system to encourage and reward people for sharing the newsletter and getting others to join. That won’t happen here at Revue yet, but I’m promised by the Revue team that just such a feature is in its roadmap. I’ll definitely jump on that when it launches.

If I live to 111 I'm having a party in Hobbiton.

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