For those of you who may be questioning how I create and update this site, I’d just like to say that all work on this site is my work.  I have not outsourced any of the WordPress development or updates on this site to anyone. (Mistake Numero Uno when doing anything – always outsource the jobs you don’t know how to do so that you can focus on the stuff you love to do but somehow I missed that lesson because what can I say, I love to learn how to do stuff).

Partly, this is because of my insane desire to learn the intricacies of the back end of WordPress but also of my curiosity and the need to “muck around” with the various plug ins and test out what they may look like when the site is finally published.  Of course, this is also dangerous as there have been times when my website ends up looking like mish mash of bits and pieces all cobbled together.

I know there will be a time soon when I may need to hand it over to an expert because by constant tinkering, I know that something will end up breaking.   (Which explains why you may see tweets from me that may be meaningless and illogical through other platforms such as the one that was sent out by Bloglovin – but that’s another story of an experiment gone wrong and the whole world now saw it)…

…Oh but the excitement of it all….

So last week I was reading Sylvia Tolisano’s Langwitches blog post on Moving from Feedburner to Langwitches Curated Newsletter and I asked myself the question, “I wonder what the newsletter looks like that is received by my blog subscribers?”

Naturally, I DO subscribe to my own blog posts and receive an email every time I post on this blog but I NEVER look at it.  It’s simply a confirmation for me that the blog post has been disseminated to my subscribers.

My Eyes Cannot Take the Ugliness and the Horror

This time however, I opened the email and well, you could say I nearly had a heart attack.  I mean, look at this, it’s CRAP.

People, why on earth didn’t you let me know that you were receiving my posts in your email inbox like this? Oh my, the HORROR!

But really, I should have known right?

Sylvia actually moved her Feedburner subscription service to her blog readers to a more visually appealing curated newsletter.  So I started to think of doing the same. After all, I couldn’t let my blog readers continue getting this nightmare into their email inboxes EVERY time I posted a blog post (and that’s on average, 4 to 5 times per month).  In effect, I was adding to their email NIGHTMARE!

So I apologise to my blog post subscribers that you’ve had to deal with this every time I posted.

You’d be happy to know that I have taken Sylvia’s example and now created a curated newsletter instead.

I had to scratch my head about how to do this and my first port of call was to go into Mail Chimp and create a new campaign and design a template then transfer the .csv file of my blog post subscribers to that campaign.

Now, you’d be delighted to read (I hope) that anyone who subscribes to my Blog Posts will receive ONE email in the middle of the month (I elected the 15th of every month) that has all the curated blog post titles of that month alone.  If I don’t post any blogs that month, no email. Yay!

That means, I will reduce the amount of emails you receive from me.  Where previously you may have received up to 60 of these horrific things clogging your inbox, you now receive only 12 of my curated ramblings.

Ah, my eyes can rest now…

So what does the new newsletter look like?  Trust me, it’s not THAT visually appealing because frankly, the graphic design and artistic genes have not progressed further down from my father (an artist), but it’s better than what it was.

Here’s what it looks like now….

For those of you who may not know, but I have TWO newsletter type subscriptions.

The first is for the Activate My Learning Newsletter where 4 tips, tools and apps related to learning are emailed out every month.  You can register for this newsletter which comes out on the first of every month here.

The second is just for my blog posts for those people who may not want to miss out on my ramblings of all things social learning.

(Now if anyone can tell me how I can curate my YouTube videos into a Mail Chimp campaign to include in the newsletter, then please let me know as I’m thinking a way around this would be to write an individual blog post for every vlog I publish so that it is captured into the curated newsletter. But that’s a problem for another day…)