Postmatic

Alpha testing begins

We rolled out our first few alpha sites this week. This is one of them.

Other alpha sites:

  1. Checkerberry – The baby blog of my neighbors Sara and Doni. They were generous enough to be our first project. The timing was great, too. Thanks to Sara taking a very long time to have that baby, we were able to get the code cleaned up a bit more and have a successful launch. Thanks Sara! The site was a good candidate because much of their family lives far, far away. So far it’s been a great hit.
  2. The Lipsum Hourly – This little guy is just a sandbox really. It’s a vanilla WordPress site that self-publishes a new story every hour. It’s a good place for folks to subscribe, leave some comments, and try things out. Posts are wiped clean daily.

Coming up next will be Blue Roof Designs, the bookbinding blog run by our own Elissa Campbell. Elissa has quite a lot of traffic and pretty lively discussions so we’re excited to see how this one goes. It will also be the first site to try out our new invitation system…

Elissa will be migrating to Postmatic from a Feedburner solution and this is what we came up with: A new utility in Postmatic settings which allows site admins to manually invite (not add) new subscribers. They can do this three ways:

  1. Import a list of addresses
  2. Invite commenters with more than X approved comments
  3. Invite commenters which have been active within the last X months

The admin can append a personalized note to the top of the invitation, and the subscribers have to opt in by replying ‘agree’. Solid.