Emails are Working Again!

 

Automatic emails for new IronSpikeMike blog posts should (hopefully) be working again as of today. For anyone who might be interested, I swapped RSS/Email tools from Google Feedburner to MailChimp.

The Gory Details (for anyone who might be interested!)

My 2 priorities in setting up this blog have been a) simplicity and b) cost (as in free) whenever possible. As such as I tend to lean toward Google solutions (Blogger, Google Analytics, Google Search Console etc). 

Following those objectives, when it came time to set up an email capability I chose Feedburner by Google, because it was easy to set up as well as being, you guessed it, free. In fairness, there were plenty of warnings out there because Feedburner was a very old tool used by blogs 10-15 years ago with rumors of being deprecated by Google. 

Sure enough, a couple of weeks ago, I received a notice from Google that Feedburner emails would be discontinued July 2021. So after only a few weeks using Feedburner, it was time to make the move to another popular 3rd party tool called Mailchimp. 

Mailchimp is fairly sophisticated and way overboard for the needs of this simple blog. But it was fun learning how to use it and getting it set-up. 

With extra care, I extracted emails from Feedburner and deleted the service completely. Then I imported into Mailchimp and did all of the other set-up to get this to work. In honesty, I feel a lot better handling email addresses in Mailchimp because they take security and privacy very seriously, as I do.

So, with fingers-crossed, this post and all future posts will start showing up in your mailbox with a link back to the site to see the full article. 

Now to start working on my next real post!

Cheers,

Spike