Joyfultoons.com went live on the internet on January 1, 2007. So, today, January 1, 2017, marks the 10th anniversary of the website. Before 2007, my cartoons had only been seen by a small number of readers: family, friends, & fellow church attendees. When I decided to share the cartoons with the world on the internet, I did not know how well they would be received. But, I was very blessed by the overwhelmingly positive response I received. People from all over the world have written me by email to tell me how they have enjoyed the cartoons, and are sharing them with fellow believers, and non-believers in various and creative ways. Over these past ten years I have heard from many people asking to use the cartoons in church bulletins, newsletters, websites, Facebook pages, blogs, etc . I am very thankful to the Lord for allowing and helping me to create these cartoons. I am also thankful for the many people who have supported the website in different ways. Their encouragement helps keep me going, and I hope to keep adding to the collection of cartoons in the coming years.

Sincerely, Mike Waters

I recently added a new feature to the website, something that I have been getting several requests for over the past few weeks and months: a subscription email list. I had an email list a while back that I managed with a program called Dada Mail, which worked well for me until the number of email addresses started to get quite high. It was taking several days to send an email. Also, managing the list was getting to be a chore, as many of the email addresses on the list were no longer valid, or were just not entered correctly. When I changed the website to a WordPress site last year, I didn’t know how to incorporate Dada Mail into it, so I just dropped the email list. I thought that posting a different cartoon weekly to my WordPress blog, as well as to various social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc.) would take the place of the email. But, as I mentioned before, I’ve been getting requests for the emails anyway.

So, I started looking for a new and better way to manage an email list, and I found a WordPress plugin called Follow. This plugin adds a button at the bottom of the website that says “Follow”. This is similar to what is on WordPress blogs hosted at wordpress.com. Click on the “Follow” button, and small screen pops up inviting you to “Follow Joyful ‘toons” and to “Get every new post on this blog delivered to your Inbox.”. There is a field to enter your email address, and a button to click that says “Sign Me Up”. You will then receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription, and a link to click to do just that. Once subscribed, you will get an email alerting you every time I make a new post to my blog. I post a different cartoon to the blog once a week.

This is still in the experimental stage. I’m hopeful that it will work, but if not, I will search for another solution.

Mike Waters