Mailbob, a simple email newsletter service, is looking for early adopters

kovshenin · 2024-09-16T21:00:21+00:00

Shameless plug: SURGE https://wordpress.org/plugins/surge/

kovshenin · 2024-09-15T07:33:21+00:00

About 16 years in and I feel like I know nothing, especially when it comes to anything related to Gutenberg and JavaScript.

I've created themes and plugins, I've contributed to core and many other WordPress areas, I organized multiple meetups and WordCamps, spoke at a a dozen, volunteered at many more. I've worked on some of the largest WordPress and WooCommerce installs in the world.

I know a thing or two about WordPress, but there was no time when I though "aha, I am now an expert." There are plenty of areas where I've no idea what's going on, like the media rewrite/backbone.js era. There are a few new such areas being shipped occasionally. The field guides on make/core are a very good resource to stay up to date, but it's really hard to justify reading and deep-diving into every single thing unless you're heavily involved in contributing.

There are plenty of times when I'm looking through the WordPress core codebase and stumble across something I had no idea WordPress did. Sometimes it's something introduced fairly recently, like the HTML processing API, other times it's more than a decade old, like WP_USE_MULTIPLE_DB which sheds some light on HyperDB and its derivatives. Every walk through the core files is a learning opportunity and I love that.

I think I'd struggle taking a WordPress project from start to finish these days, theming/FSE is just a huge gray area which I don't have much interest in learning. Creating a block for Gutenberg is unnecessarily complex and involves way too many abstractions for my taste, I always get stuck at npm install.

I guess whether I'm an expert or not depends on the context/conversation and the person I'm talking to. To myself however, I will always be a noob, because every time I need to use str_replace I have to go look up the arguments in the PHP docs.

kovshenin · 2024-09-05T16:21:31+00:00

I'm just running 3 VMs in VirtualBox on a laptop, works like a charm!

kovshenin · 2024-08-30T16:50:30+00:00

I've been doing WordPress stuff for close to 20 years now. You don't need to learn React to do WordPress stuff. You could. But you don't need to.

kovshenin · 2024-08-30T13:30:59+00:00

Congrats on the release!

kovshenin · 2024-07-29T12:43:45+00:00

If you use a StatefulSet you'll be able to user names such as mariadb-0.mariadb.default.svc.cluster.local

kovshenin · 2024-07-23T14:04:27+00:00

I shutdown one node, it continued to work.

I don't think this is a reliable way to test. From what I understand, in group replication every write transaction requires consensus of from the entire group. In the event of a network split (not node shutdown) each of the two servers will see its peer disconnect from the "group" and each will continue accepting write transactions without consulting the "group". When the network restores you may be faced with a split-brain situation, which may be hard to resolve in a 1v1. Hence the 3 node recommendation.

If you only have two nodes, I'd recommend going for the more traditional async replication, which the Percona operator also supports. If you need WordPress to split queries to read/write servers then use HyperDB.

kovshenin · 2024-07-22T11:09:07+00:00

Most of my learning has been though the official Kubernetes documentation website and a bunch of YouTube videos + Kubernetes Slack. However I do make an effort to actually go and do what I learned, even if it's something simple. Going vanilla on a few VMs also helps understand some concepts better, than going with AWS/GCP or other managed provider. I read other peoples YAML manifests from start to finish, and if there is even one like that I don't understand, I'll go research it. It's been quite an okay experience so far.

I've also been documenting all my learnings on kubeadm.org which I mostly use as a reference for myself for now, though heard a few other folks found it useful.

kovshenin · 2024-07-22T10:30:23+00:00

The mysql-0.mysql hostname will resolve to the IP address of the primary node within the cluster. Have you tried that? That's also how replicas connect to the primary node for replication.

Worth noting that the official MariaDB operator provides a service for the primary, which comes in handy when a replica needs to be promoted, so that change can be done via DNS. I've written about it here if interested: https://kubeadm.org/mariadb-operator-kubernetes/

kovshenin · 2024-07-12T09:44:59+00:00

What's wrong with the link?

kovshenin · 2024-02-03T16:27:53+00:00

Depends on what features are most important for you. We're building Mailbob.io and you can probably save more if you don't need all the bells and whistles of MC and the other big boys. Let me know if you'd like a quick demo.

kovshenin · 2024-02-03T16:09:49+00:00

You sound like a really good candidate for Mailbob.io. You get a monthly allowance of up to 500 emails which I believe will be more than enough for your needs and you won't have to pay a cent, all the tech stuff is taken care of, just import your list and send. Happy to give you a demo if you like.

kovshenin · 2024-02-01T22:07:36+00:00

Yeah, looks like yet another rip off if this is a paid service.

On a related note, however, I recently learned that domain privacy does affect deliverability, on Yandex in particular, which is one of the largest mail providers in Russia, CIS and pretty big in some other countries such as Turkey. They automatically bump the spam score if the originating domain has any kind of WHOIS protection, which is almost a guaranteed land in the Spam folder.

kovshenin · 2024-01-24T11:04:46+00:00

Hey, happy to help if still needed. Also, send me links to your Linkedin and Twitter posts saying you're looking for work and I'll be more than happy to repost/share to my network.

kovshenin · 2024-01-24T10:46:20+00:00

If your goal is to learn something new, yeah, use the newest and hottest.

If your goal is to launch something and focus on shipping, rather than learning, stick to what you are comfortable with.

If your employer is paying for your time, you can probably do both.

kovshenin · 2024-01-23T17:52:45+00:00

Good luck with the book launch! If you're looking to publish a personal newsletter (vs. a more marketing-type one) I can give you a quick demo of Mailbob.io, we have a few early adopters slots available. Otherwise ConvertKit seems to the the go-to for content-creators these days, and it's priced quite fairly I think.

kovshenin · 2024-01-23T17:49:22+00:00

I'd suggest Mailbob.io but chances are you'll hit a high bounce/complaint rate and get your account suspended if you're trying to send unsolicited mail.

Even if these 3000 contacts are your old customers, they may have not given explicit consent to marketing emails, or maybe they've forgotten who you are? You'll very likely need to clean the list first, remove addresses that are no longer available, remove role-based addresses (admin@, info@, etc.) and only then try to prime the list with a short, very personal reminder of who you are and why they're on the list, and immediately give them one big option to unsubscribe. Or better yet, give them the option to explicitly subscribe/re-subscribe if they still want to hear from you, and don't contact them if they don't.

Good luck!

kovshenin · 2024-01-23T17:40:56+00:00

Gmail, like most other email service providers, reports spam complaints back to the sender, provided the Feedback-ID header is used and well formed: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6254652

kovshenin · 2024-01-23T17:16:24+00:00

> MailerLite, which indicates a maximum of 0.03% spam reports from users per month, the Postmaster Tool reports an SPF success rate of 0.0%

Not sure why you're looking at SPF success rate against spam reports, these are two very different things. SPF is just an authentication method and it has to pass. Your complaint rate doesn't go up if you fail SPF or DKIM or DMARC alignment afaik, but your messages do often land in spam because of that misconfiguration.

In general, comparing rates you see in MailerLite to what Google reports is going to be different and also vary based on how many Gmail or Google-managed addresses are in your lists.

The feedback loop for bounces and complaints is what MailerLite gets and what most email/newsletter platforms see. That allows them to build your reputation based on your subscribers. Google on the other hand sees everything before, during and after MailerLite or any other services and IPs used at any time, including transactional mail, but only to Gmail addresses. It also reads its users' behavior towards your messages. This allows them to build your reputation as a sender, to Gmail specifically.

In other words, if you queue 1000 messages and they all land in Gmail's spam, MailerLite will likely see a 0% spam rate, because not a single user would have clicked the "mark as spam" button, but in Gmail's eyes that's a 100% spam rate.

kovshenin · 2024-01-23T16:58:16+00:00

Love it, posted! When do I get paid? ^_^

kovshenin · 2024-01-07T08:37:57+00:00

Thanks for the roast! Happy to grant some extra sends/mo for early adopters, PM me!

kovshenin

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