Tag: newsletter leaf journal

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Quoted Defending Thermopylae 〜 Newsletter Leaf Journal CCC by N.A. Ferrell (The Newsletter Leaf Journal)
The 300th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal comes to you with links to numerous new NLJ and ECS articles, 15 links with quotes and commentary from around the web, and other news and notes in a milestone mailing.

I mailed the 300th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal earlier this afternoon. I launched the newsletter back in July 2020 as a companion to The New Leaf Journal. While it still serves the purpose of recapping the week that was at The New Leaf Journal and now The Emu Café Social, it has evolved into a publication unto itself. Each issue comes with links from around the web with quotes and commentary (15 per my current practice), a list of the most-visited articles of the week on NLJ, and other news and notes. While I did not do anything special for issue 300 of the Newsletter, I started it early (meaning last night in this case) to make sure it would be a good issue and could go out in the afternoon. If you enjoy the Newsletter, do note that no email sign-up is required. It has an RSS feed and every issue is available in the newsletter archive. See my Newsletter Leaf Journal Sign-Up page for more information.

On to 400?

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Quoted Unexpired :o 〜 Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLXXIV by N.A. Ferrell (The Newsletter Leaf Journal)
Issue 274 of The New Leaf Journal features links to three new NLJ leaves and 15 ECS posts, 24 links from around the web (concluding with an Easter flavor), a link to a rubbery Mondrian game, and other news and notes from the week that was.

I mailed issue 274 of The Newsletter Leaf Journal yesterday. Fun fact: I originally mailed the newsletter on Sundays. One reason I switched to Saturday was to avoid Sunday holidays, notably Easter. Pook-Emu Bee link fans should enjoy the 24 links from around the web in this issue. I share below my personal favorite:

What lazy, sex-obsessed Western pop could learn from wholesome K-pop
Ed Power for The Telegraph. September 4, 2025.

I sent this to my good friend, visual novel collaborator, sometimes-New Leaf Journal author, and Brooklyn band front-man, Victor V. Gurbo. TBD whether he follows recommendations 1 (try rapping or some other nonsense) or 8 (“[t]one down the sex”). We’ll be watching.

Good stuff, good stuff. If that doesn’t motivate you to read, I know not what would.

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Replied to Why This Blog Uses RSS (Not a Newsletter) by Sebastian Sastre (Selective Creativity)
I’m not against newsletters. They work for many goals. But for this blog — a conceptual stream, not a growth funnel — the goal is different. I want you to read the ideas in full, in a place you choose, without a middleman deciding what you see or how.

I came across an interesting take by Sebastian Sastre on why he uses an RSS feed instead of a newsletter for his blog. I agree with the feed-first position. However, I personally recommend using both. Recommend feeds as a first option but also have a newsletter (which is a publication unto itself beyond just sharing links). I use Buttondown, which is a good service (I think it avoids some of the pitfalls of the services Mr. Sastre notes) and also allows people to follow the newsletter itself via RSS. For RSS specifically, I would also recommend telling people how they can subscribe to RSS via email using Blogtrottr or similar services.

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Bookmarked Ask a Nerd: Does email length affect deliverability? by Ryan Farley (Buttondown)
Gmail clips emails at 102kb (~15,000 words of plain text, or ~5,000 words with formatting). Other providers have different limits or none at all. If your footer gets clipped, subscribers will mark you as spam.

Buttondown, which powers The Newsletter Leaf Journal, published an informative post explaining how some email hosts clip emails that reach a certain size. It varies based on email provider.

Several email apps, like Outlook, Apple Mail, and Proton, won’t constrain your emails beyond the limits set by SMTP. Others do, though. Gmail cuts a received email short once it hits 102kb in size (not counting attachments). That tends to work out to around 17,000 words of plain text, or as low as 7,000 words when there’s a reasonable amount of formatting.

For newsletters, clipping can affect deliverability if the unsubscribe link (usually included in the footer) is clipped. While many of my issues of The Newsletter Leaf Journal fall in the 2,000-3,000 word range, I am happy to learn that I have never come close to hitting Gmail’s (or likely any email host’s) size limits.

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I mailed the 264th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal earlier today. I included 21 links from around the web (the usual). I had one saved link (see how I save links) noting the unfortunate consequences of putting a request for a Court to take one action or another in a footnote. I decided to take that as a challenge and use many footnotes in my newsletter (I wrote the footnotes in markdown by the way). While I do not think I will do the same thing in Newsletter Leaf Journal 265 next week, I must say that Buttondown’s web viewer displays footnotes in a neat way (see my newsletter and see what you think). They also came out well (more “traditionally”) in my Miniflux feed reader (our newsletter has an RSS feed by the way).

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I just finished creating and publishing a new version of The Newsletter Leaf Journal Sign-Up page on The New Leaf Journal. It had been a long time since I last changed the page. I improved the structure of the page, beginning by listing different ways people can subscribe to or otherwise follow our Saturday newsletter before explaining what people can expect to find and why I think they should consider reading. One point I highlight is that The Newsletter Leaf Journal is also the official newsletter of this humble website, so it is a great way to keep up with our new posts here as well as with my long-form New Leaf Journal articles.

Redesigning our Newsletter page had been on my to-do list for some time. Two things motivated me to complete the project. Firstly, my Winter 2026 project involves clearing things from my writing backlog. Second, I referenced adding a QR code for our Newsletter homepage in a draft article (now published), so I could not publish that draft article until I actually published the new Newsletter page.

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I mentioned in my previous post that I could not send our regular weekly newsletter due to a formatting issue in Buttondown. Fortunately, my support request was answered quickly. It turned out that I had an extraneous tag in the header (it had not caused any issues before this week). I sent the email. In so doing, I learned something interesting about Buttondown. Two reasons I like Buttondown is because it has a full searchable archive and an RSS feed. That is, it functions like a blog which supports my making Newsletter Leaf Journal its own publication. For today’s email, I set NLJ copy as the canonical URL since I published that before sending the email. To my surprise, I learned that when you set an external link as the canonical, the archive link for the newsletter takes you to the original instead of the Buttondown version (I assumed that the Buttondown archive version would be accessable but with the canonical tag pointing search engines to the original).

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I use Buttondown to host my weekly newsletter, wherein I share links from this site and The New Leaf Journal as well as 21 links from around the web and other news and notes. I had finished drafting my newsletter. Unfortunately, Buttondown is producing garbled formatting that I would not want to put in anyone’s mailbox. I sent an email to support. In the meantime I published the newsletter on NLJ. Buttondown allows for setting canonical links, so it will not be an issue once I can finally mail the newsletter to our regular subscribers and newsletter followers.

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I mailed issue 244 of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. I use Roman numerals in newsletter titles and try to add something clever. Newsletter 244 is: Newsletter Leaf Journal CXLIV 〜 54-hole week. I think this is one of more clever ones. The joke combines the Roman numerals, a sport (spoiler) reference, and the fact that I barely published anything last week. I hope someone out there sees what I did here.

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I send a weekly newsletter attached to The New Leaf Journal called The Newsletter Leaf Journal. Unsurprisingly, I focus on sharing links to my latest articles (including some from here) and news and notes about my projects. However, in the spirit of generosity and sharing external links, I pack each newsletter full of links from around the web (21 per issue, as of late). I had a markdown file with links and comments ready to use in future newsletters. This file was over 9,200 words. I managed to lose the file while reorganizing my documents, notwithstanding the fact that my preferred markdown editor, Ghostwriter, creates automatic backups (single-version automatic backups hit a snag when you accidentally write over markdown your file but keep the same name). Maybe I would have been safe the markdown document was not in one of the few working folders that I was not syncing with my favorite app, Syncthing). But the past is the past. I guess that we will be starting fresh as we prepare to turn the calendar to 2024. Fortunately, I have more than enough new links to keep things rolling (so do subscribe via email or RSS).