It's a way for blog owners to handle emailing their readers automatically whenever they make a post. I built this because I actually needed it first, but decided to try it out as a product as well.
Technically it's not terribly complicated – it has a widget which collects emails of your subscribers and it listens to your RSS feed and emails those people when you post. The goal is to make it as hands-off and hassle-free as possible to email out your content to your readers.
Built it in Node.js and Postgres, with Bulma providing the CSS defaults. I vowed to move fast in this project and to that end I decided to stay away from frontend frameworks and build the old fashioned way, with <form> tags! It was actually super fun. I've had my hands on React, Vue, Angular and Ember before, and in all of them I actually never really felt as if it felt as natural as this approach.
Anyways, I'd love to hear any feedback you might have :)
My main concern with anything these days is security. Do you have any further info on how you secure the email list that you store, etc?
Firstly, from a philosophical perspective I am at no point exposing emails of subscribers to the blog owners. The communications they send to those subscribers are limited to what's published in the RSS feed (once per new post).
As for in terms of infrastructure and app design, I contemplated the idea of implementing some kind of encryption or email alias system for a while, but ultimately decided against it. Some basic reasons are the ones also shared in the answers to this question on Stackoverflow:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/767276/what-is-the-best-...
Since there is no direct access to emails via the logged in user's interface nor is there any kind of public or semi-public database access (through for example an API – the app is entirely server-side rendered), I already limit the damage that can be done through spoofed or stolen credentials (everything from a stolen password to a spoofed or stolen auth cookie).
The database does store emails of course, but the db is isolated from the application on a different server. At launch I used a Heroku hosted database but I'm planning to provision a database environment that is only open to private network IP access.
I'm also definitely interested in beefing it up further. Any advice?
In addition to sharing on social, it also supports embedding email threads directly within Reddit threads, Medium posts, etc., e.g.:
https://medium.com/to-the-best-of-our-knowledge/were-not-ok-...
Here are some video tutorials showing more functionality:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJAEYmnEjIu4--bpq5LSK...
And we'll have a Gmail add-on submitted to Google within the next couple weeks, so hopefully that will be live by the end of the year. (Since I know a lot of HN folks have reservations about OAuth and have been asking for another way to upload content.)
Blogsend is meant as a much simpler, more focused alternative. This is all it does, and the features to be added in the roadmap are almost exclusively to help bloggers, not marketers or a general audience.
plus we take privacy very seriously, which is an added bonus.
edit: here is a link to our FAQ: https://www.gibbonwire.com/about/faq/
and our privacy policy: https://www.gibbonwire.com/about/privacy/
https://cl.ly/709c92e9ca7b/Image%202018-11-20%20at%2011.12.4...
Get this:
https://cl.ly/eac5828099c5/Image%202018-11-20%20at%2011.13.2...
Considering you've already done the hard work of parsing RSS, do you plan to support JSON feeds at some point?
Looking at the spec, it appears to differ from RSS/Atom in very small ways (besides being in a different data format). It would be pretty trivial to build in support for this.
It's difficult to find usage stats since searching for "json feed" unfortunately gives a whole lot of unrelated things!
I think if I can find a paying client that wants it, I will build this in. Wanna be the first? ;)
