Starting my newsletter with Pocket

When I started The Plunge (www.gettheplunge.com), I planned to send updates of recent podcasts, Youtube videos, and articles related to longevity. I built too much tooling to support podcasts and Youtube, but the work I put into supporting Pocket has been crazy valuable. Here's what I did.

Pocket
I knew my value would be in aggregation and summarization. I'm not trying to do research. I want to generate my own content eventually, articles about best practices and protocol. I got good feedback that I was trying to do too much in the beginning so focusing on aggregation was a clear first fix.

Saving Articles
The day the idea for the Plunge came to me, I created a new "plunge" tag on Pocket and began tagging immediately. I'm a big believer in "don't wait" when something hits, so that's what I did. Starting immediately meant finding content to share, Pocket allowed that on my work and personal computers and phone.

Zapier
I had no experience with no-code tools but wanted to cut out the time I'd wasted on other projects. I was using Zapier and Airtable for a personal workout group with some friends, so I started there.
Zapier was easy enough to set up but had a few drawbacks:

Blocked on my work computer
Bad UI on my phone
Unrealized, bigger issues

The work computer issue I could manage (not ideal though). The phone problems hurt more. It felt like I could do everything I needed but the UI is distorted on mobile. It led to a lot of wasted time at 5am - when I HATE wasting time. All that said, I was able to set up Zaps to bring my "plunge" tags from Pocket onto Airtable. I saw that the free version was unsustainable but I'd just start paying eventually. Again, I wanted to avoid writing code as long as possible and this was working (for now).

Airtable
Airtable quickly became the lifeblood of my newsletter. I'll post separately about my AT setup, but it has been the key to moving quickly from day 1. I ended up sinking too much time into creating additional columns I didn't yet need, but it's still the hub for the newsletter.

Zapier deficiencies
A few weeks into gathering articles and sending them to AT, Zapier was already giving me fits. The testing process was annoying - I couldn't quickly access the specific articles I needed, wasting more precious morning time.
The dealbreaker was the access to metadata and adding logic. The Pocket integration missed some of the metadata completely and there was nothing I could do about it. Also, Zapier logic wasn't as flexible as I wanted. I didn't want to stuff AT functions with unnecessary code, it'd be a pain to manage. I had to build something myself.

Pocket API
I got moving with the Pocket API as soon as it felt necessary - the best move I made in building The Plunge for a few reasons:

No more Zapier UI
No limits on Pocket to AT calls (Free!)
Logic applied before data hit AT
The setup was relatively quick, although the authentication UX on Pocket is a little buggy. Regardless, I only needed a single token so once I got it working, it's been a non-issue.

PythonAnywhere
I'd been avoiding dev on my work computer, which meant working on one machine in the morning and switching when the work day began. I had a 2 week trip to my in-laws coming up and didn't want to bring 2 laptops so I decided to push my code to PythonAnywhere. It's allowed me to run this script each morning to pick up my Pocket saves from the day and send them to Airtable. Super easy, free. The setup took maybe 45 minutes once my code was on Github, total success.

Pocket Assessment
Pocket is a very useful tool, but definitely could be improved for my use case: finding articles and their metadata for a newsletter. My biggest complaints:

Misses article titles frequently
Misses images frequently
Frequent bugs when tagging - I frequently tag articles that don't receive the tag
Recently blocked by work :( - The extension was blocked, so now I'm manually plugging URLs into the Pocket site.

I think there's a market (of 1 at least) for a tagging tool that gives me visual access to the DOM to setup metadata which gets saved. Let me choose the title, the author, the main image. Show me the HTML that's being used for that metadata so I can verify if it's what I want. Part of me wants to build this, but not right now.

Overall
Pocket has some flaws but it gets 80% of the job done at far less than 20% of the time it would take me to build something similar. It's a huge part of my daily aggregation workflow. Teamed up with Airtable, Pocket has been massively valuable and saved me a TON of time, all while being free.