MailChimp to Send Out Blog Posts

I have now used MailChimp to send out the blog for the past week….this blog post will be the 5th blog post it will send out.  Now that I have it configured correctly, it is working like a charm.  Personally, I think it looks better than the email version that FeedBurner sent out.

If you need to know why, I referenced the article at Feedblitz (click on image above to read it) on a previous blog post in early May.  This post is just to let those fellow bloggers how MailChimp is working for our blog, and provide a few links to help them set it up if they choose to go this route.

The above image shows what the beginning of our blog post titled “Where oh Where is Our Little Awning Now” looked like in the email.  Below is the bottom of the email of the post.

Each post includes a link to the last five postings before the one mailed out, a picture of Marcia and I, links to unsubscribe or update subscription preferences, and a “MailChimp” logo link.  One can add more stuff if they wish, but this was sufficient for our needs, at least for now.

If you have under 2,000 subscribers, MailChimp is free….no contract, no credit card required, free forever.  That seemed to be the best subscription deal I could find, but that does not mean there isn’t a better one.

  

Click on either of both of the icons above to go to a MailChimp webpage which can help you see more about MailChimp for Bloggers.  I found the setup to be fairly simple, and I did not read the instructions (like usual for me).  My first email had a “MailChimp suggestion” inserted which I should have deleted in the setup.  I also had to test a few ways to set up the subject line, and settled for this one:

*|RSSFEED:TITLE|* -- *|RSSITEM:TITLE|* for *|RSSFEED:DATE|*

With this, the email subject line for my last post looked like this:

 

TROUBLESHOOTING

1.  You will be setting up a “Campaign”, more specifically a RSS Driven Campaign.  You need to import your email addresses from FeedBurner, I did it by exporting in “csv” format, and then importing the “csv” list into MailChimp.

2.  Be sure you “start RSS” after you set it up.  If you need to edit your campaign, you have “pause” your campaign first….which means you have to “start RSS” again before it sends out again.  I thought I was done, and it did not send out the first time.  I edited by pausing to get my subject line looking better, and did not restart the RSS so it delayed sending out one blog post for a full day until I restarted the RSS.  Here is a “snippet” of the browser page you will see if you set one up.

Don’t get fooled as I did….”You’re all set to send!” does not mean you are done…you HAVE to click the small blue button to the bottom right which starts the RSS.  (When I posted the “new tires” blog two days ago, I had edited the subject line, and did not restart the RSS.  I did not notice this until Saturday night, and I restarted the RSS, and the Friday Blog Post went out Sunday at noon Eastern Time.)

After clicking the blue start RSS button, this above message appears, and you have to click “Start Campaign”.

Then you will see the “DONE” page.  Now you are active…just sit back and post your blogs, and they will go out to all of your subscribers.  MailChimp offers you some nice reports, including how many people opened their email, how many clicked on a link, and stuff like that.  You set the time you want the emails delivered….however, the person subscribing can ask for a weekly email of all blot postings instead of one each day if a new post took place.  If someone signs up, you can have MailChimp send you an email…if they unsubscribe, it can send you an email on that too.  There is lots for you to choose from.

Butterflies….

Last year we met Mary-Pat up at Crater Lake, Oregon.  Mary-Pat was just starting out on her journey for the year from of all places, the Roseville area near where my sister lives, and near where we currently are located.  I started following her blog, and noticed she was having problems with her header at the top of the blog that she was seeking help with.  I offered a few suggestions, eventually I made the header picture above which she just loved so much….and I was more than happy to be of assistance.  One thing nice about this header picture is that it has a transparent background, so if she changes the colors of her blog, it (the background behind the butterflies heart and wording) will change with it…..and with all those colors with these butterflies, there are endless colors for her to choose from which will match her header.

Today after her physical therapy for a recent knee surgery, we met her at Brookfields Restaurant in Roseville, not far from her PT.  Mom and Dad live going to Brookfields, and I can remember when it first opened not far from one of the restaurants I use to manager back in 1981…it sure took a dent out of our business at that location for a few months, that’s for sure.  (Thank goodness I got out of that vocation, restaurant work is hard, something I did for over 14 years, starting at 16 years old.)

This time I remembered to get a picture of Mary-Pat, and I included our lunch with it.  It took the waitress about 45 minutes to get to our order taken, not because of her lack of trying, but because we were engrossed in talking through much of our visit.  That is Marcia to the right, and Mary-Pat across the table from me.  You will have to visit her blog later to see a picture of us….unless I broke another camera. 

At the beginning of the month I talked about FeedBurner problems in that Yahoo, Hotmail, and others, are not sending FeedBurner emails through.  I tried a few fixes, but to no avail.  Read something from a blogger who felt that Google could fix this fairly easy, but they want everyone to use their Google Circles thing, which makes me NOT want to use Google Circles even that much more.  So I have now set up an email list with MailChimp.  By noon Pacific time tomorrow I will know if I set it up right or not to mail out the blog to our followers who have requested it.

This is going to be the first blog that MailChimp hopefully sends out…if I do it right.  MailChimp is free for email lists of up to 2,500 addresses, which means for me, it should be free for like, forever.  “IF” I ever got that high, then I think we would be having Amazon links, advertising, etc. in order to pay for it all.  Not even my intentions, that is for sure.

Here is Bubba and Skruffy earlier today on another “hunt”.  Honestly, we really don’t think either will ever get a squirrel, and as we said last year, it would break our hearts if they ever did harm one.  But it is a real hoot watching them try day in and day out.  Yes, that is a squirrel inside the little feeder house.

They have both brown and grey squirrels here in the backyard, and sometimes they can be a bit loud as they “bark” back at Skruffy.

    

There are two of these Blue Birds (left) which try to keep the other birds (like the one on the right) away from the bird feeders.  This year, they have even gone after the Doves, but since there are more Doves than Blue Birds, the Dove are less intimidated.

   

And this little hummingbird is the same little guy which keeps all but his girlfriends away from the hummingbird feeder, just like last year.

I have had some very nice places to post blogs from…mostly from inside the motorhome looking out at ocean, a river, a mountain….but here is one of the few places that I can do it sitting outside in the nice cool shade, free from bugs, and enjoy nature from just outside of the bustling metropolis of Sacramento.  Life sure is wonderful at times….

FeedBurner Email Problems

We have been doing our blog now since March 2012.  A few days ago my dad called and told me that he had not been getting the feedburner emails as he use to, but at the time I was a bit preoccupied with driving from Houston to Fayetteville Arkansas.

Putting my Library Skills to work, I finally found out why.  It all has to do with Yahoo, my email provider, who changed their email rules to try and stop spam…but it also stops FeedBurner from sending out emails under my email name.  (just click feedblitz picture above to read the article).  From what I can tell, hotmail has also followed yahoo, because my hotmail account, the one I use to sign up for anything and everything that I expect junk to be sent to, has not received the FeedBurner email either, stopping just a few days after yahoo stopped it.  Again, this is anti-spam stuff, and I am for that.  I hate spam!

Lucky for me I have a email address to go with our web domain name, GoingRvWay.com.  Any email sent to GoingRvWay.com goes to that email address, but I advertise it as “dave” before the “@” sign.  I try not to actually write out the email address to any of my email accounts because I know that web spiders troll for addresses and sell them to spammers.  Anyway, my feeburner emails will now be sent out from this GoingRvWay address, which “should” fix the problem.

Today, before we left Fayetteville, we went to church with Ryan and Kate.  They attend Cross Church in Fayetteville, which is similar to our Calvary Chapel church, but more independent.  It was a super nice service, and it was the first time I had attended church with any of my children since a young family friend had passed away back in 2006 or 2007 back in Pine Bluff.  Cross Church had a guest worship music group today, the Vertical Church Band.

Vertical Church Band is a collection of people who play every week in places all over Chicagoland as part of Harvest Bible Chapel, a place that believes singing isn’t a warm-up for the sermon; singing is a warm-up for heaven. – Learn more here. 

I found this neat resource for finding Rest Areas not only along Interstates, but along all sorts of US and State highways.  Just click on the picture above and try it out.  Not sure who put this out, but it sure is a good resource.  We are at a Rest Area in Southern Kansas.  Thought about staying at a Passport America, but decided that one night at a rest area would be ok right now after having four good nights in parks.  Tomorrow we should be close to the Wyoming/Nebraska boarder….and away from the Tornado Ally where we are now…in between bad storm systems since the weather is great.