One of the best parts of blogging is the ability to share something with the people you care most about. Over the last few weeks, we’ve built a WordPress.com feature to make that easier. It’s geared to the kind of short, casual thing you’d otherwise send in a group chat or email.
Today we’re introducing Lately, a weekly letter sent to close friends every Friday. It’s available in beta for new sites.
We’d love to hear what you think and please do send us your feedback.
Lately lets you blog by messaging the WordPress Agent on Telegram. You send notes to it throughout the week and it captures those into a draft. Every Friday you choose what to keep, what to edit, and what to discard. Once you’re ready, Lately sends everything by email to your close friends (and only your close friends). Plus, any friends with a WordPress.com account can read your letter on the web or in the WordPress.com Reader. It’s a simpler and quieter way to blog.
Blogging simplified
There’s no software to learn with Lately. It’s as simple as sending a new message in Telegram. Just share whatever you notice to the WordPress Agent and it takes care of the rest. You get the power and freedom of WordPress with the simplicity of messaging.
Just friends
Friends are at the core of Lately and your letters are only shared with them. You can send any friend a link to your site and they’ll see an option to Subscribe. Once your friends hit “Subscribe” they’re listed in your Lately where you can approve them. Only friends you approve will receive each weekly letter you publish.
Choose your style
For anyone reading on the web, Lately ships with 3 style packs, from the understated Modern to the loud Pop. You can swap these out with the palette picker in the header. Emails all use the Modern style, but we plan to bring Pop and Zine to those email templates soon.
If you’ve been quietly meaning to share more with your friends, give the Lately beta a try today.
WordPress.com News 
Thank you! Is there a demo site to view?
Not currently; we’ll take a look at making one. It’s free to set up a site, too, if you want to test it out. 🙂
This is great. Just one thing, which is that the site shows up in my list of sites. My thinking is that most people would prefer that it does not.
JenT raised this in this Forum
https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/my-reader-profile/
For now the plan is to let Lately sites show up in the sites list (the actual content is still only visible to friends). We’ll keep an eye on early feedback, though. Thanks for sharing your view on it!
What if you don’t have a Telegram account? Actually I don’t know anyone on Telegram.
It’s free to sign up for a Telegram account if you’d like to try it out. We also might add more messaging services in the future so stay tuned. 🙂
OK, thank you. I might try it.
I’m excited to try this out! dulcelatte.wordpress.com 😉 It was a little confusing to make sure just this URL was connected to Telegram and not one of my other wordpress sites.
Thanks for the feedback! And thanks for trying it out!
Is the WordPress social and Lately kinda similar?
I liked the idea thou. But I’d still would not want Lately clutter my reader side while reading thou. I would like that to be separate separate.
Thanks!
Kinda similar, yeah. Both can be very private spaces to share short updates. One functions more like a microblog / social timeline, one more like a private form of blogging / newsletter writing.
Interesting and intriguing. 🙂
I wish there were a way to sort of integrate this with an existing site. For example, the ability to create microblog type posts using the Telegram bot which would appear as regular posts but which might only get actively distributed to people who have opted in. In this way, it’d be easy to quickly post a status while giving readers the granularity to choose whether they want all content including the microblog type posts or just the main long-form posts.
Cool idea! We’ll keep it in mind.