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 Also, managing the list was getting to be a chore, as many of the email addresses on the list were no longer valid, or were just not entered correctly.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