As some people may have noticed, a few of our Web sites now look different than they did a few weeks ago. As you can see…
Logical Tips
Pet Tails
Sandpoint Insider
…now are organized by topic. This organization is different than it was before. When we set them up, the sites were arranged by issue (much like our Computor Companion magazine site is now).
With the ezine sites, however, because there are only 2 articles in an issue, the table of contents looked kind of small. Plus, given the comments we were getting, it was obvious that people were not finding the many hundreds of articles in the archives.
So we turned the whole database on its head. James took the Access databases and converted them to Excel spreadsheets for me. I then went through and recategorized each articles by topic (a total of 1000+ articles by the way). Then he committed some acts of programming magic and reuploaded them. The sites were transformed.
The other reason we made this change is because over the last 6 months or so, I’ve been overwhelmed by the amount of writing I’ve had to do to keep up with all these newsletters. People love the musings, but I was tired. We decided to just update the sites with the tips.
This change means we can use a cool feature of our newsletter service (AWeber) called Feed Broadcaster. Their system reads the RSS feed on our site, and sends out an email to our list automatically when we post a new article.
Of course, like anything technological, getting this all set up was not without a few problems. I had some trouble figuring out some issues. In the end, AWeber tech support was great, but the first guy I chatted with was a dud. Then I got Marc who explained all. (Thank you Marc, wherever you are!)
They key is that in the documentation, they don’t tell you that the first feed collection doesn’t go out automatically. Neither does any post made in the 12 hours after you set up the Feed Broadcast. The idea is that then subscribers don’t get emails about existing articles (unless you want them to). I was able to manually delete the initial articles the Feed Broadcaster queued up.
The process was somewhat difficult to test, but I felt pretty good that it was working. So this morning, I updated Logical Tips with an article, and our first automated Logical Tips notification email went out, just like it was supposed to.