We are in the home stretch of development and spending time tweaking and refining. We’ve now pushed out our 30th revision with the following….

Support for Featured Images

That’s right. As you see right above: Postmatic now supports native WordPress featured images. The template will rip your featured image to a nice horizontal and retina-ready version and place it below the post title. It looks fantastic.

Test your content with post previews

Another useful new feature is the ability to send yourself a copy of your post email before it goes to your subscribers. There is a new button located on the edit posts screen which allows you to do just that. It’s a great way to test your featured image as well as any other post content.

What’s next?

We’re wrapping up the website as well as an explainer video. Both should be done by early next week. We’re in the home stretch to a general public release.

During our beta period we’ve been trying to put Postmatic on as many different web hosts as possible. Things get pretty weird out there.

Our most common problem has been with (sorry, this gets technical) wp_cron misfiring, refiring, not firing, and in general having been coerced to be involved in all sorts of nonsense. Especially on lower-end hosts. This leads to multiple copies of a post being mailed upon publishing. And then mailed again. And sometimes even again and again. It was embarrassing.

Fixing that took a lot of work, but it was worth it

Dylan pulled out all of the stops to come up with a solution to make sure this never happens again. The details? I’m not sure. He’s way smarter than I. But the result is that each and every email that flies through the system is sorted, sifted, sniffed, marked, tracked and screened in order to make sure it never goes out twice. And it works very nicely. Even on shoddy hosts. Adios duplicate emails!

A nice bonus

Since things are now tracked so closely it became possible to add a new option to the edit > post screen. Now when you write a new post you can override Postmatic and choose to not have that post emailed out.  Next we’ll be adding a feature to this area in which you will be able to watch the realtime delivery of your post, as it happens. There’s a little counter that’ll tick up showing how many emails have been delivered. Fancy.

This actually solves a lot of previously unanswered questions such as what happens if you migrate a site and import a bunch of posts? What about if you republish a post?  All of this has been taken care of. Cheers, Dylan and Ankur!

 

We’ve had our heads down in the last few weeks paying attention to the servers during our alpha testing period. We think we’ve nailed scaling issues and are ready to roll out to a larger audience.

What’s New?

• Speed, speed, and more speed.
• Further simplified the subscribe/unsubscribe process by removing the widgets from those templates.

Alpha 17 has been pushed to all sites. Shout out to the amazing Burke, Krista, and Lucas at our latest alpha install Lucas Camilo. I was so happy that they reached out to become testers because their site is such a perfect example of the kind of blogs we want to be on.

What’s Next?

We launch next week on a few significantly higher traffic news sites. We’ll try our luck there and then pretty quickly move into a formal public beta launch.

We just pushed the 15th(!) version of our alpha release out to all of our testers. Notable improvements in the last few days:

Usability improvements to the templates

1. We spent time minimizing the amount of cruft while emphasizing the actual posts and comments
2. We cleaned up the beta footer. The gray background was putting too much weight on it.
3. We now force proper capitalization of all usernames. Looks nice.
4. We dropped the font size of the add a comment and manage your subscriptions area

 Simplified things by making site-wide subscriptions the default

The Postmatic widget changes behaviors depending on where it is. Previous to this version there were three behaviours:

1. If you were on a generic page or term archive you would be invited to subscribe to all site posts
2. If you were on an author archive you would be invited to subscribe to just that author
3. If you were on a single blog post you would be invited to subscribe to comments on that post

Thanks everyone for your feedback… it seems that comment subscriptions were pretty confusing. So, we’ve axed #3 from above. You can still subscribe to comments by leaving a comment or, of course, by replying to a post email with the word ‘subscribe’ or even subsrive, sbsubribe, subsrib!

Quieted down the notifications

When you leave a comment on a post via email you are by nature subscribing to other comments on that post. You used to get an email letting you know that you have been subscribed. We turned that one off.

As mentioned in my previous post, we now have a fantastic invite your community invitation system in Postmatic. As of tonight it is live and has been pushed to all testers.

We wanted to create an invitation system which would help bloggers reach the people that matter most – their commenters. This really nails it.

Here is a quick video on how it works

You can read more specifics about it on our faq.

Why it matters

We see tapping into an existing group of engaged users as a huge challenge for Postmatic. Many sites that we approached about beta testing already had an existing solution such as Feedburner or Subscribe2 in order to get their posts to their users (neither of which offer commenting by reply). So now the door is open and switching to Postmatic is not only easy, but elegant as well.

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.

 

I’ve worked in the WordPress world for well over 10 years, yet I don’t think I have ever actually written a blog post. This will be nice.

We are excited about Postmatic and are glad you are here with us.

It feels fantastic to have developed this technology and now be so close to sharing it with the rest of the world.

Where we are now

This will be easier to understand with a little bit of product overview. We have broken the technology up into a number of products, two of which we will be releasing this year:

1. Comments by Postmatic: The free widely available WordPress plugin which allows for subscribing by email, and replying by the same. It’s on this site right now and perhaps you are even using it.
2. Postmatic: The more exciting big brother which focuses on community collaboration, crowdsourcing, and machine-assisted emergence.

Comments by Postmatic is wrapping up development while the core Postmatic product is still a few months out. The remainder of this post will only discuss Comments by Postmatic.

Alpha testing

The launch of this blog coincides with the beginning of our alpha testing of Comments by Postmatic. All of the core technology is in place and we are performing small scale testing in a variety of hosting environments among a small network of brave friends. We hope our alpha will be just a week.

Pilot program

As soon as things feel solid with alpha we will roll out our pilot testing program to a larger number of a few dozen well known WordPress sites. We do not yet have any commitments but we have identified about 100 high profile sites that are perfect candidates and ought to have more comments!
If you know of any WordPress sites that might be good candidates for the pilot program please leave a comment.

What makes a good pilot?

• A blog which is not hosted on wordpress.com…
• with commenting enabled…
• which does not run a 3rd party commenting system such as Disqus or Facebook Comments.
  If you know of a blog that might be a good fit but you are unsure go ahead and let us know anyway. We’ll figure it out for you.

Beta testing

If all goes well with the pilot we’ll enter beta about two weeks later. We are going to seed the beta program using a combination of social media and viral (i hate the word but it’s true!) techniques. In this case it’s simple: every email Postmatic sends of a post or comment during the pilot program will contain a link in the footer saying Delivered by Postmatic. Clicking that will bring them to a beta signup site.

Public launch

We hope to be in beta for less than two weeks and then launch officially in the WordPress plugin repository shortly thereafter.

What we need from you

Let us know of interesting pilot projects. That would be the best help right now. What blogs are you reading? What’s exciting right now? Who needs a little help?. Leave them as a comment here. If you happen to have a contact at the blog in question let us know.

Thanks for keeping in touch,
Jason