Blogging

There are 96 posts filed in Blogging (this is page 7 of 10).

Choosing a mailing list tool for WordPress besides MailChimp

I started a news site for covering the protests in Portland (https://portlandprotestnews.com/), and I wanted to offer a way for people to subscribe to an email newsletter containing the daily posts. My first thought was to set up a MailChimp newsletter, since I already had one set up for another site (https://OrgModeForBeginners.com). However, I quickly realized the first limitation of a free account on MailChimp – only one mailing list allowed – darn! I was not interested in starting to pay $10/month to MailChimp, and it would only bump up to 3 mailing lists. So, I started looking for other free alternatives.

My first step was to find another service like MailChimp. After a little searching, I decided to try out Sendinblue (https://www.sendinblue.com/). However, the email it sent out was not impressive (I selected a RSS publish, and it did not show any links except to the main posts), and the subscription form had some problems in sizing, so I resumed my search.

My next experiment was to look at the mailing list feature provided by my web hosting service (based on GNU Mailman (https://list.org/)). I spent about 4 hours over 2 days poring through setup instructions and managed to get a mailing list set up that seemed to work the way I wanted. I then needed to create a signup form, and tried using WPForms (https://wpforms.com/), which was available as a free plugin within my WordPress install. I got a form set up, but then had problems getting the form to send an email to the email address for the mailing list to add a new subscriber. At that point, I decided to try another tack – looking for a WordPress plugin that could handle everything.

The first plugin I tried was WP-Subscribe (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-subscribe/), but it only worked with MailChimp, Aweber, and Feedburner (could not use any other email delivery provider, I was thinking I could reuse the Mailman list I set up, but no go). The grand prize winner was The Newsletter Plugin (https://www.thenewsletterplugin.com/), which had a free version that supported signing up subscribers, creating a newsletter, and sending it out to the list. After about an hour of testing, I sent out my first newsletter, and it looked good! I ended up deciding to copy the text from the daily weblog post to the HTML email newsletter form, and adding custom embed code for Twitter posts.

Overall, I learned a lot about setting up mailing lists and figuring out what I wanted from a mailing list tool. My top features were price and ease of use. If I could have created another MailChimp list, I would have done it in a second (since I had an account). Since I did not want to spend anything just yet on a new mailing list provider, ease of use was the next criteria. It was a shame that it took the better part of two days to weed through the contenders, but I think I found a solution that will at least get me started.

Bookmarked Where Do Blog Post Ideas Come From? (Blogger)

Someone asked me by email, do you have any advice on how to come up with blog post ideas? I recently launched an informational website, so …

Nice article by Stephen Downes on his blogging process…

Replied to Building a Day Log Habit by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

Last week I joined an IndieWeb conversation on blogs and wikis. I ended up with three take-aways. One of them was a tip by another participant to keep a day log as a means to add more to the wiki, do more wiki gardening. Writing a list of things you do during the day as you go along, you can the use…

Ton, I am replying to your post, I had been keeping a daily journal of what I was doing, but your description of  a day log includes a little more, I am going to try that this week.

Editing Issue in WordPress – Right to Left Text Display

A few weeks ago, I was editing a post in the WordPress Classic Editor (WordPress v4.7.1). After about 2 paragraphs, I accidentally touched the trackpad on my laptop, or did something with the mouse, and then noticed that the editor was behaving strangely. As I was typing, the new text was appearing in a right-to-left direction instead of left-to-right direction.

My first response was to check the INS/DEL keyboard keys, but that did not correct the problem. I then copied the text into a new post, but the problem remained. I then switched from Visual mode to Text mode in the WordPress post editor, and saw some extra elements in the paragraph tag (like the ones in this W3Schools page). When I deleted all the extra text in the paragraph tag, the editor started working as expected again.

Has this ever happened to any other WordPress user? I would like to know….

 

Want to help creating RSS reading lists for news orgs?

This morning, I saw a tweet from Dave Winer responding to a Emily Bell and Aron Pilhofer thread on making news story data available for public understanding. Dave made the following comment:

Emily, Aron — I’ve followed the other thread. Interesting. Here’s something useful that could help right away. A collection of RSS feeds from news orgs, maintained, with metadata. Something a group of j-school students, maybe even from different unis, could do. 😉

I added this to the thread:

I have a start at this, see http://andysylvester.com/files/reading_lists/…, these lists are used by River5 to power http://fullblastnews.com

Several years ago, I created lists for print media, news networks, video from news networks, and collections on other topics for a demonstration site called FullBlastNews.com. It was meant to show off River4 (at the time) and use of tabs to switch between different news rivers. Some of the navigation is having some problems now, but the rivers still run….

I am publishing my reading lists/rivers lists/RSS lists URL to help jump start this, I am not sure if Aron or Emily or Dave will take any action, but I will be following this conversation to see where it leads.

 

My 400th post

I just discovered a nice feature in the WordPress admin interface, it lists the number of posts I have made, and this one is number 400! I have been blogging since 2007 (says my first post) and it has been an on-again, off-again thing for the most part. I would say that I started to be more regular about posting in November-December 2018, and have had several strings of 20-30 posts in a row. In the world of people posting to other services like Facebook and Twitter, I have focused in on my weblog as the main place for my writing, and a series of websites from my domain name (need to list all of those sometime!). Here’s to the next 100 posts!

Install notes on 1999.io and MyWord Editor

I am working with Ron Chester to set up some instances of the 1999.io and MyWord Editor blogging tools, and have some test installs working on my Digital Ocean instance. I did have to make a tweak to one of the files in the nodestorage app, will be filing a Github issue on this. However, I did want to capture a few points that I re-learned in doing this again:

  • Install separate instances of nodestorage for each app (using different ports), otherwise you will mess up one of the tool outputs.
  • The Twitter API setup at apps.twitter.com has changed a little bit, what used to be called consumer secret and API secret are now part of the API secrets at the top of the page with the secrets info.

If you want to try the installs, go to the following URLs: