Hi everyone! This post is only relevant for the... *checks clipboard* nine people who have subscribed to have blog posts emailed to them. If that's not you, disregard (though I would love it if I could get more people subscribed via email rather than funneling people through Facebook, so maybe read this post and consider subscribing).
Anyway, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was notified that the Blogger widget that has managed my email subscription is being phased out at the end of the month (i.e. in a couple days). Here's my solution: I'm going to start publishing the blog as a newsletter that can get emailed out to everyone. I'm going to be using Letterdrop to do this, which is basically like Substack (but hopefully without the support for right-wing extremists). I'm just going to put all the email addresses currently subscribed in the widget into a Letterdrop mailing list and go from there. The blog site will still be active and the hub for all my activity, but I'm going to copy-paste each post into the Letterdrop format and send them out as I publish them on the actual site. It'll look a little different from the emails you've been getting, but I've tested it out, and it doesn't look bad.
Sometime on Friday, I'm going to mail out a practice newsletter just to make sure everything works, so be on the lookout for that. It will be from blogmalley@post.letterdropmailer.com. When I tested this out on myself, it got sent to spam at first, so be sure to check your spam folder and make sure that email address is something your inbox isn't going to boot out. After that, I'm planning on just jumping into mailing out the blog posts via Letterdrop, starting this Sunday.
Fingers crossed that this works. I hate being forced to adopt new tech when the old tech was working fine for me, so I'm not thrilled that I have to make this change. But hopefully it'll just become an invisible part of my blog routine. Most importantly, I hope the people who want to are able to still read the blog.
As always, thanks to all you dedicated readers out there!
Oh, and if you want to preemptively subscribe to the newsletter, here's the link to the site, where it should be pretty straightforward to sign up!
Hey - just to make sure I understand, if I've been keeping up with the blog via an RSS reader, that's not going to stop working?
ReplyDeleteI think an RSS reader should still work. I just used to have a widget that Blogger supplied that emailed people new posts directly, and that's been discontinued. But I don't think that affects an RSS feed.
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