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Show HN: DrudgeNewsletter.com – my weekly project

3 points by joering2 14y ago

joering2 14y ago
I mentioned it on HN somewhere before that I think it would be nice to have a Drudge weekly news recap for all of us who don't have time to track DrudgeReport on a daily basis, and in my opinion, DR is an awesome place to find news as much unbiased as possible :) So here it is. Let me know what you think. An example/last issue is here: [1] Developer notes: Environment: simple PHP/MySQL, no framework. Any development issues: not too much. The new thing I learnt is how tricky Gmail and Yahoo webmail are in regards to HTML emails. For example: GMail will replace black links with blue ones; both "color: #000000" and "color: black" will get stripped away. Hackerish solution: set the color to "#000001" and you good to go. Yahoo will overwrite links even nastier: both with their own colors and will apply their Ads for keywords in your links (it puts additional dashed blue line underneath your links). Hackerish solution: overwrite their "yshortcuts" class in all tags: span, div and a. Generally, webmail providers do not like when you apply any styles to links. To make sure you tried your best, apply your style in multiple tags, like this <div style="your style"><a href="" style="your style"><span style="your style"><font style="your style">link</font></span></a></div> . This will increase your chances of getting your links the way you want them to look. I haven't tested with Hotmail or AOL and frankly I am scared of doing so, but will play with it soon. Also always use tables (still love them) to format your content (or rather should say: to force formatting). Algorithm notes: There is no secret sauce, per say. I monitor Drudge in 5-minutes periods and capture basic info: article name, link, position, photo, etc. I monitor first and last changes for a day, since Matt does not work 24/7 :) At the end of the week (Friday 6pm est) I analyze the links pool (fri-fri) per column, and pickup only the ones that spend "enough" amount of minutes/hours on the site. Then review results and pickup the most interesting (I've been Drudge constant reader for about 5 years now) and organize links in easy to read flow of news. As you can see in the last issue [1], I try to presume links and photos' outlook in original way, and try to interfere into UX as little as I can. Note that this is a week old project, with just one issue sent out. I welcome all your thoughts, suggestions, etc. Advertising notes: I tried some paid tweets but since the users that are willing to sell those usually tweet about music, girls and fun stuff, I got very little clicks. I run a simple CPM campaign on Facebook and while click-through rates are obviously low (0.01%), the remaining fact is that 90% of people that click and went to the site end up signing up. I think it's a huge success; unfortunately the CTR rates for FB are low, because people go there to watch friends' photos and post status updates, not to look on ads. Personally, I unconsciously trained myself not to look at the spots where ads are. So even with conversion rates of 90%, the 50 cents per CPM I still end up paying $1 per signed user. Too much. Marketing notes: this one I left out to you. I am mostly a computer programmer and lack knowledge on advertising an online newsletter like this one. Any help from your side as to how I can build a DrudgeNewsletter userbase will be appreciated. With very good conversion rates on FB, I plan to put some money into advertising it, so if you have a vehicle that you think I should take advantage of in regards to spreading the word, please definitely let me know. [1] http://drudgenewsletter.com/latest/ http://drudgenewsletter.com/latest/

3 points by joering2 14y ago

I mentioned it on HN somewhere before that I think it would be nice to have a Drudge weekly news recap for all of us who don't have time to track DrudgeReport on a daily basis, and in my opinion, DR is an awesome place to find news as much unbiased as possible :) So here it is. Let me know what you think. An example/last issue is here: [1] Developer notes: Environment: simple PHP/MySQL, no framework. Any development issues: not too much. The new thing I learnt is how tricky Gmail and Yahoo webmail are in regards to HTML emails. For example: GMail will replace black links with blue ones; both "color: #000000" and "color: black" will get stripped away. Hackerish solution: set the color to "#000001" and you good to go. Yahoo will overwrite links even nastier: both with their own colors and will apply their Ads for keywords in your links (it puts additional dashed blue line underneath your links). Hackerish solution: overwrite their "yshortcuts" class in all tags: span, div and a. Generally, webmail providers do not like when you apply any styles to links. To make sure you tried your best, apply your style in multiple tags, like this <div style="your style"><a href="" style="your style"><span style="your style"><font style="your style">link</font></span></a></div> . This will increase your chances of getting your links the way you want them to look. I haven't tested with Hotmail or AOL and frankly I am scared of doing so, but will play with it soon. Also always use tables (still love them) to format your content (or rather should say: to force formatting). Algorithm notes: There is no secret sauce, per say. I monitor Drudge in 5-minutes periods and capture basic info: article name, link, position, photo, etc. I monitor first and last changes for a day, since Matt does not work 24/7 :) At the end of the week (Friday 6pm est) I analyze the links pool (fri-fri) per column, and pickup only the ones that spend "enough" amount of minutes/hours on the site. Then review results and pickup the most interesting (I've been Drudge constant reader for about 5 years now) and organize links in easy to read flow of news. As you can see in the last issue [1], I try to presume links and photos' outlook in original way, and try to interfere into UX as little as I can. Note that this is a week old project, with just one issue sent out. I welcome all your thoughts, suggestions, etc. Advertising notes: I tried some paid tweets but since the users that are willing to sell those usually tweet about music, girls and fun stuff, I got very little clicks. I run a simple CPM campaign on Facebook and while click-through rates are obviously low (0.01%), the remaining fact is that 90% of people that click and went to the site end up signing up. I think it's a huge success; unfortunately the CTR rates for FB are low, because people go there to watch friends' photos and post status updates, not to look on ads. Personally, I unconsciously trained myself not to look at the spots where ads are. So even with conversion rates of 90%, the 50 cents per CPM I still end up paying $1 per signed user. Too much. Marketing notes: this one I left out to you. I am mostly a computer programmer and lack knowledge on advertising an online newsletter like this one. Any help from your side as to how I can build a DrudgeNewsletter userbase will be appreciated. With very good conversion rates on FB, I plan to put some money into advertising it, so if you have a vehicle that you think I should take advantage of in regards to spreading the word, please definitely let me know. [1] http://drudgenewsletter.com/latest/ http://drudgenewsletter.com/latest/