A Note to Subscribers

Dear A Daily Dose of Architecture Books Subscribers,

For many years, I've been using FeedBurner for this blog's site feed and to distribute posts via email. It's all automated and has therefore been a great service to use, one that makes my life a good deal easier. Until now.

Google, which bought FeedBurner in 2007, recently announced it is transitioning the service to "a more stable, modern infrastructure." Good news, except for the fact the transition means they "will be turning down most non-core feed management features, including email subscriptions." Crap!

So before the transition happens in July I'm forced to find a replacement for email subscriptions or ditch the service all together, relying on social media, the RSS feeds that will continue to syndicate the blog content, and people visiting the site on their own or via Google searches. I'm hoping that you, like me, would like to continue the emails.

The solution I've decided on, and that I'm going to implement between now and the beginning of June, is a weekly newsletter via Substack. Although the FeedBurner emails were delivered (almost) daily — sent out automatically every time I made a new post — most newsletter systems are handmade affairs and also have limits on frequency and distribution, at least for free services (this blog does not make enough money to pay for services like MailChimp).

Since I'd rather do one newsletter a week rather than one every day or so, the dDAB Newsletter (or whatever it's going to be called) will go out via Substack every Sunday, with links to each of the books reviewed over the previous week as well as a peek at the books planned for review in the coming week(s). And even though it's on Substack, which many writers are using to monetize their content, the newsletter will be free.

Do you need to do anything? Not if you're already a subscriber via FeedBurner. If you are, you'll be included in the new weekly newsletter when I migrate the subscription database to Substack at the end of May. I'm not taking new subscribers via FeedBurner between now and then (I removed the subscriber widget from this blog in mid-April, when Google made its unfortunate announcement), but once I have everything set up on Substack later this month I'll start taking new subscribers then, with a link or form on my blog. 

The target date for all this, as I mentioned above, is early June (I don't want to wait until Google's July deadline). So the last daily updates will go out via FeedBurner on May 28th or 29th, and the first weekly newsletter will go out on Sunday, June 6th. If all goes to plan. Which I hope it does.

Any questions, advice, comments? Please reply to this email if you're reading this in your inbox, or comment below if you're reading this online.

Sincerely,

John Hill

Blogger, A Daily Dose of Architecture Books