I Think I’ve Finally Set Up Subscriptions Properly

The title says it all, really.

Some of you might be aware that once upon a time I was using Feedburner to run an RSS feed so that people could subscribe to the blog. Google, of course, has now yeeted their support for Feedburner (several years ago, actually, but I haven’t exactly been maintaining the blog properly these past few years so it took me a while to catch on) which left me not only with no way to let people subscribe to the blog, but also with no one who was previously subscribed to the blog still subscribed to the blog.

Annoying!

So then I did some Google-fu and discovered that WordPress includes a built-in email subscription thinger, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I hadn’t just used that in the first place. So I set that up. And then I found out why I hadn’t used it in the first place (and why no one uses it, as it happens).

It doesn’t work.

Oh sure, you can set up the form. You can put it in a widget on the sidebar of every page. You can enter an email address in it. It will even send you a confirmation email asking if you meant to subscribe. That’s as far as it goes, unfortunately. It doesn’t record your email in a list anywhere, and it never sends you another email to let you know I’ve posted a new post. Which is sort of its only job.

I also didn’t realise it wasn’t working until a few people told me they’d subscribed to the blog but weren’t getting any posts delivered to them.

Now, if you’re reading this, you’ll notice that there’s a form in the top right of the page that lets you enter your email and subscribe. It looks different to how it used to look. That’s because it is different. This one works. (I think)

In order to get this new subscription thing up and running I had to sign up for a service, edit the DNS information on my web host, create forms, create lists, create email templates… it was an awful lot of work for what you’d think should be a pretty simple thing. It wasn’t at all a simple thing, and so I hope you’ll consider making use of it and subscribing to the blog.

I’ve set it up to send out one email a week (on Thursday) with all the new posts from that week. The way I see it, more often might get annoying and less often won’t give me the attention I so desperately crave.