I’ve been keeping the Buffer full of links and headlines for the last week or more. It’s been good for our engagement and adoption rates. Today I got us signed up for Mailgun which we’ve decided to use for “transactional email” (think confirmation messages and password reset emails). I also setup Mailchimp for newsletter purposes. For some reason I thought we’d already registered for Mailchimp but it looks like we hadn’t. As promised Mailchimp has lots of beautiful HTML email templates to choose from. I’d like to use Mailchimp for both but their API (Mandrill) is no longer a part of the Forever Free plan. Somewhat surprisingly, Mailgun also has email templates, so I’ll be sorting through and picking one or more of those as well. Mailgun also offers 10,000 outgoing emails a month for free, that should be more than enough to start. Once we grow past that point, it’ll be time to look at Amazon SES, another transactional email service, but as with all Amazon’s hosting and internet IaaS’s, the documentation can be a little byzantine.

I was somewhat frustrated by developer API access for Facebook today. They have so much available on their developers dashboard it’s almost daunting. I did not find the documentation overly transparent. It’s not dense like Amazon’s but kinda unclear and all over the place. Please, just tell me what each of your offerings does in the 1st 2 or 3 sentences. Is that so much to ask? This is somewhat a pet peeve, there are so many well documented services (free and otherwise) on the net that it’s always jarring when you stumble into a popular social media service that has opaque user guides and HOW-TOs. I’ll have to try it again another day, I quit after an hour or two because I’d end up going down a rabbit hole of frustration and teeth-gnashing which would leave the other tasks I had slated for completion/attack today unfinished. It’s been said before but there’s always something to do at a startup. So it’s best to maintain traction and momentum wherever possible.