Yesterday’s two NFL games are what the playoffs are all about. High-scoring games with plenty of action. 🏈
New updates to Faviconographer. Might give it another try.
FastMail rule added to delete the almost daily emails I get from Cloudinary for their Heroku addon.
Atom still trying to play catchup with the likes of Sublime Text. I can’t see it ever happening.
Reading Twitter with Feedbin
This is a great move for Feedbin. Rather than following a single collection of accounts, I can now subscribe to a core collection of users, lists and perhaps even some individual accounts.
You can start adding Twitter content to Feedbin the same way you would subscribe to a feed. Feedbin will recognize any Twitter URL that contains tweets. It also supports shortcuts for subscribing directly to twitter @usernames as well as #hashtags.
Best of all though is that I can read these tweets alongside my existing RSS subscriptions.
Michael Wade once again delivers a gem of wisdom:
Move more into the role of “Creator” and away from that of “Reactor.”
Making the Most of Feedbin's New Twitter Integration
Today Feedbin announced a new feature to their RSS reader which allows you to subscribe to Twitter users, searches, lists and hashtags.
I've been looking at this for the last couple of hours to find a way that will allow me to continue to use Twitter, but without mhaving to check on my timeline as often. Here's just a few ways that I see me using Feedbin's new Twitter subscription options.
Vanity Searches
A few months ago I removed analytics tracking from my blog. It was a decision based on the fact that I'm not interested in the numbers anymore. I don't want to see how many people viewed my blog in the last 24 hours, and I don't want to see how many visitors I've had in the previous week. These numbers don't drive why I blog. It's the content that drives why I blog. It's about getting links back to my blog from other bloggers.
To do this, I have a saved search in Feedbin that only includes blog posts that contain my name. Sure it doesn't have the accuracy of analytics tracking, but through the blogs that I follow and the times that my name appears in this search, it's a great indicator of what other bloggers like on my blog.
Feedbin's new Twitter integration will allow me to broaden my reach so that I can use searches on Twitter to include tweets that either includes my Twitter handle or my domain name.
Better Reading of Lists
Twitter's lists have always been difficult to use. I'm not a big fan of reading Twitter on my mobile and changing between lists on other apps is not great either. Feedbin's new Twitter integration will make digesting lists a lot easier.
I have some accounts on Twitter I follow, but I would like to bundle into lists. I've tried in the past to do this, but I frequently forget to check these lists. Separating these accounts into lists makes my timeline much easier to follow.
With these new lists to follow through Feedbin, it is a lot easier to follow and scan through.
RSS to the Rescue
Right, so Twitter dropped RSS a long time ago, and since then it's been difficult to follow people through anything other than Twitter on the web or through one of the many Twitter clients that are available. So it's not RSS to the rescue but Feedbin to the rescue by providing a genuinely different way of consuming Twitter.
The next few weeks will see the accounts I follow tail off to perhaps around fifty or so accounts, but I'll continue to use Twitter for sharing content from this blog and my micro-blog as well as responding to replies on Twitter.
This bug on Ghost is driving me round the bend. Every character you type in is registered as two keystrokes so ‘t’ becomes ‘tt’ and pasting from the clipboard doesn’t work either. Why am I using Ghost again? 🤔
My First MailChimp Campaign
A few weeks ago I had an idea. A newsletter that would provide help and guidance for a particular type of organisation in using the Internet and social media to promote and connect with their target audience.
To make this happen, I decided to use MailChimp to handle the sending out of the newsletter. I’m already a subscriber to several newsletters that use MailChimp, so if it’s good enough for them, then it’s good enough for me.
I was able to put together a template for my campaigns over a couple of hours. One thing that I had to do some digging around for though was how to send welcome emails out to new subscribers. I eventually found this and was able to have that email setup in about half an hour.
The final task was to update the landing page with the correct form attributes so that email addresses are sent to MailChimp directly. Again, straightforward.
I spent a couple of hours over the holidays putting together a landing page where people can sign up; I just needed the MailChimp form to complete this. The first pass is pretty much on par with every other landing page I’ve seen for such newsletters, so I’m happy with the results. It will be tweaked over time though to encourage sign-ups.
I already spent a couple of hours last week writing the first campaign. After a further few passes at it and some feedback from Jen, I had an initial campaign ready to send out.
I spent about 30 minutes testing the two emails that get sent out. I spent a bit more time on the first campaign, tweaking parts of the email design and ensuring that I had all the correct information in the right place.
MailChimp allows you to preview email and include live merge tags in your preview so that you can see what your subscribers see, but the real test is in sending out a test email. A test email allows you to look at all parts of the email as the subscriber should see it. Great for checking that everything is in place and that it reads fine.
The next part of this little project is to send out a few invites to organisations that would benefit from this newsletter and invite them to subscribe. With the first campaign sent out, I have an example of the content available through the newsletter for organisations to see.
I’m not expecting a massive rise in sign-ups over January, but I’ve got a goal in mind, so I’m aiming for that.
I was surprised by how quickly I was able to get a mailing list up and running on MailChimp. Previous attempts using MailChimp have always resulted in me turning away from it. This time though, I kept it simple, so I just got the absolute essentials in place. A welcome email and a first campaign.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be spending a bit more time digging into MailChimp and seeing else it can help with in maintaining an email list.