Refactoring DLTJ, Winter 2021 Part 3: «Serverless» Newsletter System

Refactoring DLTJ, Winter 2021 Part 3: «Serverless» Newsletter System

So it has been quiet here for a couple of days.
Rest assured: the quietness comes from heads-down work, not from giving up.
Here are the refactor-DLTJ activities so far:
Ramp up automation for adding reading sources to Obsidian
Refactor the process of building this static website on AWS
Fix the webmentions cache, an unanticipated diversion
Recreate the ability for readers to get updates by email (this post)
Turn the old DLTJ “Thursday Threads” concept into a newsletter
Since New Years Day, I’ve been working on a way to send the contents of blog posts by email…commonly known nowadays as a newsletter.
Years ago, I was using the Feedburner service to do that.
Then Feedburner was bought by Google, and things were mostly okay for a while.
Which is to say that most everything was working, and the things that weren’t—
like HTTPS for custom RSS domain names
—had workarounds.
But last summer
Feedburner-Google discontinued the distribution of blog posts by email
, which necessitated the need to buy or build my own email distribution system.
There are certainly «buy» options.
For instance, one might use
Medium
for writing and distribution.
But I’ve seen too many services come and go to come to rely on a business to be a good steward of my content.
The
Substack service
has the same problem.
For a while I considered the
follow.it service
as an alternative to Feedburner that included a newsletter-like add-on, but its «white label» service inserts the «follow.it» domain name in critical places where I would lose control over my list of subscribers.
(After all, I’m only able to do this cleanly because I kept control over my RSS feed by using «feeds.dltj.org» as a hostname.)
So I’m running it myself.
I briefly considered
listmonk
, but I don’t know the Go programming language so that make troubleshooting and enhancing more of a challenge.
Not readily spotting other alternatives, I created my own system using AWS tools, the
Serverless.com framework
, and the Python programming language.
Thanks to a
great outline by Marco Lancini
and
ideas from Victoria Drake
.
The
newsletter infrastructure software is on GitHub
.
It deserves a decent README file and some documentation to help others use it if they are so inclined.
There are also a number of hard-coded areas that would need to be made more general.
(See, for instance,
these couple of lines
that are used to pull out the body of the blog post for inclusion into the newsletter email.)
But Why
I’ve been asked,
why do you go through all of this work instead of just hosting your blog on WordPress.com
?
That is a reasonable question and it deserves a thoughtful response.
I like control of my content.
My writings have always been stored on devices that I have a moderate amount of control over—first WordPress on a personal server in a co-location space, then WordPress on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) server, then as static files cr…