For years, I have followed the basic idea that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well that doesn't apply to technology at all. If it works but it is more than 6 months old, it needs to change just for the sake of changing and make sure that everybody has to keep up with what is going on. On top of that, periodically they decide that things need to be paid for on a subscription basis. That's a topic for another post (don't get me started on that now). Blog/website/email stuff is no exception to this rule. I am finding a trend where at the start, something is easy to find and setup, then the changes start. They archive stuff. They improve stuff. Next thing I know, I'm being told that doesn't exist on my plan but if I upgrade, I can get it back easily.
For a while, back in the late teens, I had things setup so that if I posted on my blog, the lovely 29 people who follow me, would get an email to tell them there was something new. It was pretty easy to setup and it worked pretty well. Then things started to change. If I changed the day I posted to the blog, the email would still say Wednesday. Then it got to the point that it didn't work at all. I saw a couple of articles that said RSS feeds were going away completely in the internet (turns out that was incorrect). I didn't see how they could go away because they are pretty spiffy little things that let one program know when another program has done something. RSS is Really Simple Syndication, and in the beginning it was really simple.
Since I decided to move my blog back to a hosting site that makes things easy for me, it means that a lot of stuff happens under the covers, and that means that it's not easy for me to find a lot of things. For some reason, Blogger has decided that letting me find the RSS feed url for my own blog should be something even more secure than the UN. So I have to guess. Then I go over to MailChimp, and they keep pushing me to upgrade to a paid subscription in order to get RSS feed support in an email campaign, despite the fact that their own help files say I can do it easily on the plan I'm on. So after several hours of beating my head against a wall and reading the same articles over and over, I think I have it setup now. The key word being think. I guess we will all find out on thursday morning if I did it right.
This really isn't what I want to spend my time doing. I wish there were an easier way to do this, but I apparently don't have enough hours in the day to find out what that is. That's one of the big reasons I switched away from WordPress. I want to spend my time writing and quilting, not keeping things on my blog and website up to date, yet here we are again. I guess I have to file this one under There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. I promise the next post will be about quilting. This one is mainly just to find out if my RSS feed email campaign will work or not.
