Or maybe, it's just you.

Until yesterday, I hated the service I use for my email newsletter. I mostly disliked it because I need to run some proprietary javascript on my website for the registration link (I'm aware this is something most people don't care about). What turned this dislike to contempt was that the service wasn't even working correctly.

Whenever I published a new post, instead of sending out a mail for the one I wrote, it send out a random post I had written before. Since there isn't anybody registered on this newsletter yet, and it took me a long time to write new posts, I didn't further investigate this. Nevertheless, I knew that I wanted to change the service and possibly write my own. Yesterday, I saw this issue with new lights.

To make my daily writing stick, I set up an automated habit tracker for my daily blog (I'm using Beeminder). Next, I use Zapier to automatically grab the RSS feed for my blog and insert new data points into Beeminder whenever I publish a new post. While testing the connection to my RSS feed in Zapier, I noticed that the posts didn't have a GUID.

GUID is an acronym for globally unique identifier. Until then, I didn't know this field existed and assumed that the post's identification simply happened via its link. Usually, this isn't something you have ever to think about. I, on the other hand, have written my own website generator that also generates the RSS feed. While writing this code, I had missed to set GUIDs for my posts.

When I saw this, it dawned on my. Of course, the newsletter service couldn't correctly identify the newest post when the identifier used for exactly this purpose was missing. And I had projected all dislike on the service and blamed it for not working correctly, while the problem laid in the code I had written.

Sometimes, if it's working for everybody else, maybe it's just you. And really, everything is just fine.