Max Cutler

This week’s topic of dis­cus­sion at the CoPress forums regards email subscriptions/alerts, some­thing which I’ve given a fair amount of thought to in the past few months. Today’s post will cover how the YDN has used email sub­scrip­tions up to the present and some ideas for email han­dling in Courant News.

YDN Head­lines Email Screenshot

YDN

Since the launch of the cur­rent YDN web­site in Jan­u­ary 2007, we have had a head­lines email sub­scrip­tion avail­able for pub­lic con­sump­tion. Vis­i­tors could either sign up with just an email address, or if they had a YDN.com account there was an option in their user set­tings to sub­scribe. We cur­rently have sev­eral thou­sand sub­scribers to our email list, which encom­passes both the daily (nightly) head­lines and break­ing news sto­ries. To the right is the email for today’s issue.

As I’ve dis­cussed before, our web­site cur­rently runs on a cus­tom sys­tem built on the CakePHP frame­work. Because send­ing thou­sands of emails at once is a time con­sum­ing process, we use a mail queue sys­tem to spread out the work. When the edi­tors click the “Email head­lines” link in the admin inter­face at the end of the night, we queue up all the emails in a table in our data­base. We then use a cron job to pull out a cer­tain num­ber of emails from the queue each minute and send them through our out­go­ing mail server. It can take up to 30 or 40 min­utes to process all the emails in this man­ner, but it pre­vents over­load­ing or slow­ing of the server, and the emails are not really time sensitive.

Courant News

For Courant News, we have also planned to imple­ment a queue-based mail sys­tem. django-mailer plans to do alot of what we want, but is still in an early stage of devel­op­ment. It is part of the pop­u­lar Pinax project, so I’m sure devel­op­ment will con­tinue for the forsee­able future. The queue is just part of the email sys­tem, how­ever, and we have some ideas about how to make emails more use­ful and customizable.

The basic premise is that we wanted peo­ple to be able to sub­scribe to emails like they can sub­scribe to RSS feeds, where they can choose to only receive con­tent from cer­tain sec­tions, or by cer­tain authors, or with cer­tain tags, etc, etc. For exam­ple, a par­ent of one of the staff reporters might want to get an email digest of any arti­cles his/her son/daughter writes, while not nec­es­sar­ily want­ing to have to fil­ter through all the rest of that day’s paper’s con­tents. Or some­one may only be inter­ested in news in a cer­tain sec­tion, such as Sports. The user would also be able to choose a peri­od­ic­ity of the emails, choos­ing to receive such aggre­ga­tions daily, weekly, or monthly.

While many younger peo­ple are com­fort­able using RSS feeds, many less tech-savvy stu­dents, alumni, and par­ents are still unaware of or unsure how to use RSS feeds. Oth­ers, like myself, may sim­ply pre­fer emails to dig­ging through an RSS client. By giv­ing such vis­i­tors the abil­ity to sub­scribe to emails with exactly the con­tent they want, we can increase the like­li­hood that they will fol­low those links to our site and become fre­quent vis­i­tors. By not forc­ing them to sift through a bunch of links they prob­a­bly don’t care about, we can reduce the fric­tion asso­ci­ated with brows­ing our con­tent and help them find what they are look­ing for.

We’ve cur­rently been explor­ing how to imple­ment such func­tion­al­ity, and have sev­eral ideas. Email alerts/subscriptions are one of the next things on the docket for actual imple­men­tion for Courant News, so I wel­come any feed­back or addi­tional ideas and sug­ges­tions from the community.