Personalized emails, safer screenshots, and article-aware posts
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This release ships three things: personalized emails, safer screenshots, and article-aware posts.
Newsletter issues now open with a greeting written in the founder's own voice, one that can reference the current day, date, or a nearby holiday. Sequence emails go further, greeting each contact by first name, filled in automatically at send time, with a graceful fallback when the name isn't known. On the screenshot side, uploads up to 4 MB now succeed instead of failing with a server error, and approval can no longer publish an item that's still missing its picture — it stays in Waiting on you until it has one. And when you ask Ballad to write a post about a specific article, it now pulls the real piece from your recent articles instead of guessing.
Emails that feel personal
Two changes here, both automatic, both about the moment someone opens an email.
Newsletter issues now open with a greeting written in the founder's own voice, and they can reference the current day, date, or a nearby holiday depending on when the issue actually sends. Not a placeholder like "{{day}}" — the real day, filled in at send time, using only what's known true then.
Sequence emails work the same way for a different variable: the contact's name. Every step now opens by addressing the reader by their first name, filled in when the email goes out, with a graceful fallback for the contacts where we don't have one.
Nothing to configure. Both just work the next time a newsletter issue or sequence step sends.
Posts grounded in a specific article
Ask Ballad to write a post about a particular article, and it now goes and reads before it writes. It pulls from the workspace's recent articles across all voices — collection, date, a short gist of what the piece actually says — and grounds the post in that specific entry.
Before this, a request like that meant Ballad was guessing at what the article covered from the title and a bit of context. Now it knows which Collection the piece lives in, when it ran, and what it's about, so the post it writes references the real thing instead of a plausible one.
Safer screenshots, and a support toggle
Product screenshots up to 4 MB now upload without hitting a server error — oversized images get shrunk in the browser first, and if a file still won't work, you get a clear message instead of a failure. Approval is also tighter: an item missing its screenshot can no longer slip through and go live. It stays visible in Waiting on you until the picture is actually there. And in Settings > Workspace, there's now a consent toggle to let Ballad support access your workspace temporarily to help troubleshoot — read-only, time-limited, fully audited, no changes possible. Off by default; you decide if and when to turn it on.
