Earlier this week, I decided to install the latest Postmatic beta on this site in order to give it a try. For those who aren’t familiar, Post Status has a great write up about it and you can watch the promotional video for it below:

In short, I think that anyone who manages a blog with any number of subscribers and commenters wants an easier way to manage their comments.

Maybe not. Maybe that’s just a few of us. But I know that I spend a significant portion of my day in my inbox, and I know that I try to respond to every comment that I get on this blog.

Sure, some fall through the cracks and that sucks, but having everything aggregated into email should alleviate that problem, right?

What is Postmatic?

Postmatic

The plugin does a number of things two of which are my favorite:

  1. Your content gets delivered to readers in an email. And they can comment just by hitting reply. No accounts. No forms. No browsers.
  2. Hit reply on any Postmatic email to comment on that post. You can send a reply on an existing post, too.

If you treat your inbox like a type of TODO list, then this fits in nicely with your workflow. I’d love to see this become a common way of managing comments on a WordPress-based blog.

As of the time of this writing, the plugin also has the ability to import all of your Jetpack subscribers. Straight from Jason from Postmatic:

Your Jetpack subscribers are kept in place and will always be there (since they live on wordpress.com).

So this means that if you opt to disable Postmatic, Jetpack is still good to go if you reactivate it.

What Does This Mean For This Site?

For now, it means very little:

  • First, I’m going to be deactivating the plugin that gives readers the ability to subscribe to comments via email in favor of using Postmatic. I will be doing this on December 1st, 2014.
  • Next, I am going to work to transition all of my Jetpack subscribers over to Postmatic (which should be easy enough given its latest features)

After that, I’m eager to hear feedback from those of you who receive the emails via Postmatic and who end up commenting via Postmatic, as well.

Anyway, in the meantime, everything will continue as normal until December 1st, 2014. After that, the switch is being flipped and we’ll see how it all goes!