Yes, been away from the blog for a while, but for mostly good reasons. I went to England for a couple weeks in June and then have just been enjoying summer since then. And working! And side-projects! And podcasting!
But, I’m popping in to share what I consider to be a big win! You know when there’s the way of doing things that you know about, and then you discover a new way of doing it and your world is just blown? Yeah, that’s where I’m at today.
Been working on getting a newsletter set up for a side project I do with friends. We haven’t announced the newsletter yet, and that’s turned out to be a good thing, because it turns out that Mailchimp just was being a pain in the butt for what we wanted to do. And then today I heard about MailPoet, which is a WordPress plugin that allows you to build newsletter content right inside your WordPress site. Yes, it’s really that amazing!
I mean, we haven’t actually sent anything yet, or figured out that end of it, but in the last 40 minutes, I’ve gone from completely dreading the whole process of figuring out this newsletter to completely delighted with the whole thing. With Mailchimp, I was going to have to figure out some sort of custom RSS feed or just do a lot of copy-pasting of content across – the plan for the newsletter was a bit of a highlight of the content for the week, so just having our standard RSS feed wasn’t going to cut it. But then we’re all super busy so manually copy-pasting stuff into Mailchimp every week also wasn’t going to be a reasonable solution.
But! Then! MailPoet. I initially installed it on this site (after doing some research and reading on my commute home today), and once I realized I liked how it worked, I signed up for their free account and installed it on our side project site. From initially installing it on my site to sending out a preview of my first draft to then coming and writing this blog post, it’s been 45 minutes. And that was mostly spent picking awesome photos for the newsletter…
There’s definitely some quirks in their drag-and-drop builder, but there’s always a bit of a learning curve with any new tool. In general, it’s just such a treat to find a tool and have it actually do what you’ve been struggling with.
And shoutout to MasterWP newsletter for having them as a sponsor – again just lovely to have thing that really highlights great stuff happening in the WordPress community (and beyond).