12/23/2023 0 Comments Trello shippingEach issue needs some customizations, such as the date, preview text (what people see in their inbox previews), and an Editor’s Note. The first list in Trello (named “Meta”) is unique. (The archive for that issue is here, if that’s easier on your eyes.) Here’s a screengrab of the Trello board for Weekly - Issue #33 (click for full res version):Īnd here is the Issue that the board produced (click for full res version): I’ll explain how it works, but let me first save 1,000 words. Anytime we learn something new or make a change, we update the boilerplate and any future issues will inherit the new stuff. We copy that to a new board and we’re ready to roll. We have a board called “Weekly - Boilerplate” that is a skeleton of what a new issue needs. The planĮach issue of Weekly gets its own board. This means we can write all of our content in Markdown and Trello will display it to us the same way it’ll be rendered in Weekly. If Trello didn’t support Markdown, it would’ve been a deal breaker for us. I don’t know about you, but at The Changelog we freakin’ love Markdown and write all of our content with it. If we’re both working on Weekly at the same time, we know it, and we don’t have to take turns by “checking out” or somehow locking the work-in-progress. What’s even better is how Trello instantly updates the state of a board for all users. Create new lists to define a new section in the newsletter.Move stories to different lists or boards with ease.Drag and drop stories to quickly reorder them.With many CMS’s, this is where we’re often left to copy/paste our content in one big text field. You also have to present that content in an organized, easily digestible fashion. Organize with easeĬontent curation is just one part of creating something people love. When I find content on the go, I can place it in our Weekly board, write it up, and be done with it. Trello’s mobile apps suit my completionist style quite well. Trello lets you easily transfer cards between boards, so at the end of the week he goes through Radar and moves the best cards over to the board for the current issue of Weekly, edits, and ships.īonus: since Radar is also a shared board, I can look through all of the content Adam has collected for inspiration for what I'd like to include in Weekly as well as the blog or Twitter. This way our board for the current issue of Weekly stays nice and clean. These emailed-in cards go to a board called “Radar”. Adam uses Trello’s Create cards by email feature instead of emailing himself. Trello is flexible enough to handle both styles. When I find something to post, I want to categorize it, write about it, format it, and be done with it. It was all stuck in his inbox (doesn't scale). Prior to Trello, he was emailing himself (I know, right?) and triaging a label in Gmail at the end of the week. It’s a mark-and-sweep approach, if you will. At the end of the week, he goes through his findings, organizes everything, and includes the best stuff in the newsletter. Throughout the week, whenever he finds interesting content he emails it to Trello. We can even discuss the content via the built-in commenting system!Īdam and I have different editing techniques. Avatars, multiple email addresses (awesome feature, btw), notification settings? All of these features are there for us to use. We simply add Trello users to the board and they are instant collaborators. Thankfully, the Trello team has put a lot of thought and effort in to that complexity so we don’t have to! Multi-user systems can be surprisingly complex to build. To reduce the "bus factor," we needed more than one person curating the content. Here are some of the biggest wins: Instant collaboration It works so well, in fact, that it almost feels like we’re cheating. We think Trello makes a great CMS for this kind of content. If Weekly were an online store, Trello would be our Shopify. If Weekly were a blog, Trello would be our WordPress. We are using it to manage the content of the newsletter. I want to be clear: we are not using Trello to manage production of the newsletter. So we turned Trello into a Content Management System (CMS) for the newsletter. We needed to collaborate, but we lacked a collaboration tool. His process (manually writing ERB templates in Middleman) did not scale well. There was just no way that he could keep up that pace.Īfter months of silence and a constant stream of people asking what happened to Weekly, we got to thinking. After personally hand-crafting and shipping 29 consecutive issues, Adam burnt out. As many of you may know - The Changelog Weekly - our free weekly email covering everything that hits our open source radar - was on hiatus this summer.
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