Your link library

Everything you keep for a future issue lands in the same place. The library is a panel inside the composer, opened with the Library button, and the number on that button is how many items are waiting for you.

Where the library is

The library is a panel in the composer rather than a page of its own. Open a draft, press Library, and it slides in from the right with what is waiting, newest first.

That position is deliberate: an item is only useful next to the issue you are writing, and the composer is where that happens. The panel holds the fifty most recent waiting items and the count on the button counts what the panel holds, so a longer backlog than that is not all visible at once. Each item belongs to a newsletter rather than to an issue, so if you run more than one newsletter, each one has its own library.

What lands in it

Two things put items in the library: the Chrome extension, when you choose “Save to library” instead of an issue, and your readers, when they use the submit page on your website.

Every row says which of the two it was, so a reader’s suggestion is never mistaken for something you picked out yourself, and a submission carries the reader’s name when they gave one. Pasting an address into the composer does not go through the library at all: a link you add by hand goes into the issue you are editing. There is no email-in address and no feed ingestion, so the extension and reader submissions are the two doors in.

The three states an item can be in

An item is in the inbox, used, or archived, and the panel only ever shows the inbox.

Inbox means waiting. Used means the item has gone into an issue, which happens the moment you insert it, and the row leaves the panel at that point. Archived is a state the data model has and nothing in the application currently sets, so there is no “not this one” button: an item you decide against stays in the inbox.

How an item becomes a link in an issue

Choose a section in the “Insert into” picker at the top of the panel, then press Insert on the item. Issue Mint copies the address, the title and the note into the issue as a link at the end of that section, and marks the item used.

Filing happens at that moment because a library item carries no section of its own. Uncategorised is one of the options, and a section with nothing in it does not appear in the issue, so an insert into the wrong section is a drag away from being right. From then on the link behaves like any other link in an issue: you edit the title and your note on the link itself, and the library item is finished with.

Only a draft or a scheduled issue has a composer around it, so inserting from the library is something that happens before an issue goes out, never after.

How you hear about what is waiting

Three things tell you: the count on the Library button, one digest email a day for reader submissions, and the weekly summary, which reports how many submissions are still sitting unused.

Nothing else asks for your attention. Saving something yourself with the extension produces no email, on the reasonable grounds that you were there when it happened.

What the library deliberately does not do

The library is an inbox and very little else. It has no search, no tags, no folders, no way to edit an item after it arrives and no ordering beyond newest first.

That thinness is the point. The sorting a curated newsletter needs is editorial, and it wants the issue in front of you: sections, running order and the shape of the thing are all composer work, so the library’s whole job is to hold a link and your note about it until you are ready to make those decisions.