I want to build an email mailing list for people who are interested in my writing.
The easiest way for me to do that is probably to use a form service like Tally.so. Tally is a free service that lets you create online forms. It’s similar to Google Forms and other related tools. I have a pro account, which gives me a few extra options, but the free version should work fine for this.
What I need is a simple “Subscribe” form with a title, short description, and a field for email address.
One thing that will be a pain with this method is that I will probably have to manually download the list when I want to use it. It would be really nice to be able to do this automatically. I’ll probably look into that and write about it in the future.
My plan is to use this tool only until I get to 1,000 or so subscribers.
I don’t want to embed any third party content into my site, as usual. So, I’ll use a hyperlink that says “Subscribe” or something similar, and links over to the form elsewhere. This way, only those that are interested will load the third party content.
To be clear, I think Tally is a pretty good steward of users private data. It’s based in the EU where privacy rules are strong and it doesn’t use a cookie banner because they opt to do things in a way that doesn’t require it. I suspect that is the hope with a lot of the new privacy laws, but instead, most companies just throw up a cookie banner and do the minimum they must to protect user privacy.
I digress.
Checkout the form I’ve created below. In the next few days I’ll figure out how to make this form double opt-in so that subscribers can confirm their email address before I send them any messages.
I’ll also create a quick command-line tool to log my daily activity and I’ll create a tool to send those monthly logs. Stay tuned!
Written by Joel Dare on October 18, 2024.
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