“News” is a utility I wrote for generating/uploading well-designed email campaigns in Sendy from source files written in Punct (Markdown+Racket). I use it to publish my Port Watchers newsletter.
Sendy is a great tool for self-hosting lists and sending large (or small) volumes of email to those lists via Amazon SES, but it is not as convenient as services like Tinyletter or Buttondown for sending simple, well-designed newsletters. It does not assist you at all with HTML formatting or provide useful defaults, does not check your links for you, and does not automatically generate a plain-text version of your email.
“News” fills those gaps. You can find some screenshots and a dime tour of how it works in this toot.
Prerequisites:
- “News” is a command-line Racket program, so you need Racket and you need its
binfolder added to your “PATH”. - You will need to install Punct separately (it is not on the Racket package server).
- You also need to buy and set up Sendy, which includes setting up an AWS account to use Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES).
Clone this repository, and from within its main folder, run raco pkg install --link. This will
install the folder as a Racket package.
Finally, create an options.ini file in the repo’s folder and add these options to it:
sendy-api-key: <your-API-key-here>
brand-id: 1
base-url: https://example.com
sendy-endpoint: https://example.com/sendy/api
from-name: Your Name
from-email: [email protected]
The brand-id is the ID of the “Brand” you create for your newsletter within Sendy. The API key is
available in your Sendy installation’s “Settings” screen.
Write your newsletter in Punct and add news/tags to the #lang line. This provides the
webversion, meta and unsubscribe functions.
Here’s an example newsletter:
#lang punct news/tags
---
title: This Becomes Your Subject
---
•(webversion)
# First Issue
•meta{Hi, you’re getting this because you subscribed, but you can •(unsubscribe) if you want.}
Etc. Add [a link](https://ipcow.com) for good measure.
Your source files can reside anywhere, they don’t have to be in this repo’s folder.
When ready, run raco news yourfile.md.rkt:
$ raco news yourfile.md.rkt
[ ✔ ] Loaded yourfile.md.rkt
[200] OK: https://ipcow.com
[ ✔ ] Sendy API check… success!
[ ✔ ] Campaign created
The command checks all the links in your source file, and creates a new campaign in Sendy that contains both an HTML and plain text version of your newsletter.