Some of you may have received two emails yesterday or today. One earlier than the other. One better formated than the other. And here's why.
Feedburner May Be Going Away
Feedburner, the Google product that let's people subscribe to RSS feeds and even can mail them to your inbox, started closing things down a while ago. First it was their Twitter account, and then it was their API. That has people wondering if Google was going to also close down Feedburner itself. And because of that, I decided it was time to move my subscribers to a different outbound-email engine.
AWeber isn't nice with List Importing
Initially I had thought I would use AWeber, as there were a couple of features I liked more than MailChimp. Plus MailChimp made designing templates a real pain. But I own accounts at both so I started looking into it with more details. When I found out that moving my Feedburner list to AWeber would mean a bunch of opt-in emails going out to all of you again, I decided against it and moved things over to MailChimp. There is no easy way to move various lists to AWeber without kicking off the entire subscription process again. And that bothered me more than a cruddy interface over at MailChimp.
Additionally, I just heard from a friend that MailChimp was getting ready to roll out some new stuff that would make template design a lot easier.
WordPress has Native Feeds
Now some of you are thinking that Feedburner owns the actual RSS feed. And that's only partially true. They indeed own the one that I used to push out there, but WordPress produces feeds natively and there's no issue using that feed with MailChimp to create my outbound newsletter. In fact, WordPress supports feeds for each category, so at some point I'll make it so you can subscribe to only WordPress articles or only New Product articles, etc. But not for now.
But Can't WordPress do Newsletters?
Others of you are wondering why I'm even using MailChimp when WordPress has countless newsletter plugins available. But before you go putting links in my comments area, know this. When you use those plugins, you're counting on WordPress to mail things out. That means you're counting on your hosting provider to mail things out. I love WP Engine. I seriously do. But I love them because they know hosting. Not because they know emailing. MailChimp (and many others) know emailing. So no, I don't want my email sent from WordPress. Already I use a WordPress plugin for outbound email (for non-newsletter stuff) that routes email to SendGrid so that it can send mail instead of using WordPress to do it. But for Newsletters, I choose MailChimp.
You can Sign Up today!
Haven't signed up yet? Fill in your email on the box on the right – in orange.
Unsubscribing from the Duplicate One
So if you received two emails, look for the one that doesn't look as pretty as the other. Go to the bottom of that one and unsubscribe. It's the feedburner email.