Hi from Steve. Welcome to the eighth issue of this Friday newsletter. My aim is to give you the most helpful news and updates for WordPress publishers. If you want more regular updates, join our Facebook group.
AG & WaterDesk is a WordPress-powered publisher with a great mission and explainer video
Many recent local journalism stories can be hard to follow. There are often a lot of organizations involved with confusing names and purposes. That is true in this story about “Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk”.
Fortunately, AG & Water Desk (as they call themselves for short) have a very worthwhile mission and a great 4-minute explainer video.
Jetpack launches a limited newsletter alternative to Substack
It’s no secret at that Automattic would like to complete with Substack in the paid newsletter space. This week, they launched the first version of Jetpack Newsletter. It does allow you to write newsletter inside WordPress using blocks, and it does offer paid subscriptions. However, there are several key limitations in this first version. It appears to only be available on WordPress.com hosting, the design features are limited and you can’t import more than 100 email addresses. Hopefully they are able to iterate quickly, and perhaps even provide it to WordPress.org users.
More Links for WordPress publishers
Ars Technica published Part 2 of their overview of their WordPress hosting. This part is very technical. For example, they dive into why they want to use Amazon EFS are than S3 for their media library storage.
Lesley from Newsletter Glue posted a Twitter thread breaking down the newsletter from LINA, an Australian organization that supports local news.
NASA has a new Beta version of their website available, powered by WordPress.
Thanks for joining us for this eighth issue.
I build WordPress tools for publishers at PublishPress, TaxoPress, MetaSlider, and Logtivity. Here at KinshiPress I write about what I’m seeing with publishers we deal with each day. This newsletter uses the Newsletter Glue plugin. Click here to email me anything, including tips for future issues.
Steve Burge