Ask HN: How do you track copy changes on websites/emails?
Have a client with multiple departments making copy changes/edits on email templates and websites. However, it either comes in forwarded emails with strikethroughs and red/black text, or in a word document with two columns showing old and new, and you have to eyeball each character. Is there a tool or better way to do it?
I have been using urlwatch[1] for years, I have a cron run daily which will send a diff of the page(s) via email. You can also use it for checking local file changes and more.
If it's just the text that they're concerned about, then putting that text (email and website text content) into something that can track changes is the right solution. Developers would use git. You could use Google Docs with a separate one for each email template and website content. Maybe MS Word if they use Sharepoint.
The simple answer is probably Google Docs with all the tracking and collaboration turned on so that every change is tracked by who made it and when. But again, that's only relevant for the text and maybe minimal layout.
This is how I’ve had the most success in the absence of a CMS. Automate dumping of the website text into Google Docs/Sheets and have people edit those.
Ours are all stored and managed in the CMS/DAM we use, which happens to be Adobe Experience Manager. When the email service renders an email, it calls the CMS endpoint which returns the html with handlebars style template placeholders. That endpoint is heavily cached so not too worried about the mail service hammering it.
Staff get to format the email in a graphical editor they’re familiar with that handles revisions etc, and we don’t need to manually import templates.
It had a great intuitive UI to track diffs in prose that everyone and anyone could understand. (Truly exceptional and generous work Nate! Made my life better! Thank you!)
Depending on your appetite for Intuit, Oracle, and Salesforce products, they have marketing email suites that do exactly this. It might be a bit expensive/heavier than what you want.
Otherwise I used Mailtrain with a small team and it worked ok. We used git for source code tracking for the designers and then the CMS for small changes.
i had a similar problem but for access control, getting emailed the new/old roles a person should have, or a list of new emails to onboard
i ended up showing them how to use github and create prs with a csv. at first i copy pasted the csv and imported it, but in the end completely automated it
it may seem completely alien to them at first, but if can get them access to a repo and just show them how to edit a file in the ui, it's much easier to do that and create a pr than it used to be in github. to me it was worth the initial headache - after a few weeks they were very smooth with it and changes got through way faster
Hey, I was building something similar a while back for a specific usecase around shopify stores. Wondering is this a sustainable business and how long have you been running this for?
Hey, sorry for the slow reply, didn't get any notifications from this site.
Sustainable - Perhaps, we have daily signups but people are not converting to paid users. I plan to change are pricing strategy to credit based usage, and I'll see if that will improve things.
We are also going into e-commerce direction with a spin off product, so hopefully that will go a bit better.
Do you mind sharing what is the tool that you build?
For websites, there's a bunch of hosted services for this, like VisualPing or ChangeTower or Sken.io or BrowserStack. It's often called "visual regression testing".
For email templates, they usually create a HTML version hosted online somewhere too, don't they? You can probably use the same tools for those if they're publicly accessible.
[1] https://github.com/thp/urlwatch
The simple answer is probably Google Docs with all the tracking and collaboration turned on so that every change is tracked by who made it and when. But again, that's only relevant for the text and maybe minimal layout.
Staff get to format the email in a graphical editor they’re familiar with that handles revisions etc, and we don’t need to manually import templates.
https://github.com/mojoaxel/awesome-regression-testing
It had a great intuitive UI to track diffs in prose that everyone and anyone could understand. (Truly exceptional and generous work Nate! Made my life better! Thank you!)
Otherwise I used Mailtrain with a small team and it worked ok. We used git for source code tracking for the designers and then the CMS for small changes.
i ended up showing them how to use github and create prs with a csv. at first i copy pasted the csv and imported it, but in the end completely automated it
it may seem completely alien to them at first, but if can get them access to a repo and just show them how to edit a file in the ui, it's much easier to do that and create a pr than it used to be in github. to me it was worth the initial headache - after a few weeks they were very smooth with it and changes got through way faster
It sends you summarized changes straight into inbox and it has a free tier.
If you do give it a try, I'd love to know what you think
Cheers!
Sustainable - Perhaps, we have daily signups but people are not converting to paid users. I plan to change are pricing strategy to credit based usage, and I'll see if that will improve things.
We are also going into e-commerce direction with a spin off product, so hopefully that will go a bit better.
Do you mind sharing what is the tool that you build?
What is your budget?
It will determine your options.
You can also do this yourself with something like Playwright: https://playwright.dev/docs/test-snapshots
For email templates, they usually create a HTML version hosted online somewhere too, don't they? You can probably use the same tools for those if they're publicly accessible.