Many of you may have gotten two emails yesterday. The first one later than normal and the second with the same content as the first, but with a little bit different layout and much later than normal. That is because I am switching email newsletter services from using the free Feedburner service to using a paid service.
Feedburner was great in the beginning, especially the ability to send out your blog content to email subscribers in addition to RSS subscribers and for free. But, over the years Google hasn’t done much with it upgrade-wise and basically has kept it barely functioning. There used to be the occasional problem and an email wouldn’t get sent, but last year this started happening more frequently. And over the last two or three months you may have noticed it happening multiple times a month. Or, you may have ended up getting your email late in the day, once I was able to fix the problem and reset it to send out.
One of the problems was that you can only send out during certain time windows, so if it didn’t see a new post at 7:00am PT, it wouldn’t send out an email during the 7-9am window. Depending on when I noticed emails weren’t sent out, I would reset it for the next available time period available. This would usually be later in the day. I work nights and usually type up that day’s picks post in the morning when I get home and then head off to bed, only to find out later that the email never went out and the next available window is 1:00pm PT or later.
Over the last few months I’ve been testing out a new service with mainly just me at first and a few new subscribers over the last couple months and an email was only missed once at the specified time. The difference being, as soon as I noticed it, I could send the email out immediately. No waiting and hoping that Feedburner didn’t break the feed again before it got to the new time window, which happened early this week.
Also, the new email service allows for people to get instant access to the Printable Schedules right after joining the email list, instead of having to wait until the next morning. If you’ve been on the email list for a while now, you should’ve gotten one of those emails this morning. Then once the imported list of emails was approved at the new service, it sent out the first email in the new format yesterday afternoon. The normal schedule should resume this morning. Although, you may again receive two emails, one from each service. If everything goes as planned, I will turn off the Feedburner emails and you should only get one going forward as of Saturday morning.
And, with the new service, I can send out other emails. Like a weekly or monthly roundup of articles, previews, etc posted at the site. Or, let you know when a giveaway is about to end, I’ve come across a good deal on something, am about to go live with a Q&A or am guesting on someone else’s podcast live, etc. I don’t plan on sending much more than the daily update, but it’s nice to have the options available.
I’ve been putting this off for a while now because of the added cost to running the website, which barely brings in enough to cover the hosting costs as it is. Let alone the time it takes to create the content and run the site. But, I’d like to kick things up a notch here and bring you bigger and better things, like the recent addition of The TVaholic Previews … podcast and more. And, a reliable email service is just the next step in the process.
I’ll have more tomorrow about what changes will be coming for RSS subsribers.
If you have any other questions about the switch or what it will mean for things going forward, you can leave a comment in the comments section on this post, send me an email or hit me up on Twitter @theTVaholic.
