Monkey Business

Okay – so some folks asked about signing up for Aleta.Life updates. In the old days we’d have mimeographed a bunch of pages and sent them in an envelope with a stamp from some exotic location. The stamp might have had perforations along its edges and a tongue full of horse glue on its backside for sticking. Those days are so long gone it’s not even worth musing on the stomach cramps we might have gotten from that glue.

Now we use code! If only we’d spent more of our time in high school studying how to code rather than how to type it might be happy hour already. But since you asked, here’s what I spent eight grumpy hours working on today (sorry bunny):

1. Opened a MailChimp.com free account for email distribution. Spent a while figuring out how their interface works, what a campaign is, Googling how to get an RSS feed into an email automatically and just what ‘free’ really means in their vernacular. Degree of difficulty? 2 (out of 5 digital wrenches)
2. Downloaded and installed a MailChimp plug-in for our WordPress-powered blog site. Generated a little code so we could include a sign-up on the sidebar. (1 wrench)
3. Installed JetPack from WordPress.com and linked it to my admin account from WordPress.org. (1 wrench) I did this because Carol wanted to know stats. Once we’re past the point of taking off our shoes to count our followers this might be helpful.
4. Set up an email account on our Hostgator site for carolnmike@aleta.life and linked it to our gmail account for easy access and easy, ghosted replies. Don’t ask me why, it was some idea about consistency I had. (1.5 wrenches)
5. Entered twiddly bits of CNAME and TXT information into our Hostgator DNS profile to ensure links between MailChimp and Aleta.Life were seamless. (2 wrenches) If you don’t know what the DNS profile is, this is more like a 3.5 wrench thing because it’s all about Googling simple, but slightly obscure stuff.
6. Edited the MCHTML for the RSS email template because MailChimp needed to generate its own version of HTML and the RSS data coming in was formatted like a dog’s dinner. This took a bit of time, but finally yielded. If you already know HTML this would be a 2 wrench job, but I’m giving myself 4 wrenches due to the amount of head-scratching and general cursing associated with what should be a <strong> relatively </strong> simple exercise.
7. Added a custom HTML link to the blog sidebar for RSS savvy folks to copy and paste into their Feedly or whatever. (1.375 wrenches)
8. Generated an email address so that we can post blogs via email. In theory we can be on the high seas and updating via the SSB. We’ll see… (1 wrench)

There you are. As simple as that. If you sign up you should get an email reply welcoming you. Once you’re signed on, we are sending out weekly update messages via RSS on Fridays. Thank you for reading. Please subscribe and keep following the Adventures of Aleta.

PS. I discovered in this process that Internet Explorer is still Windows 10’s preferred browser. I will rant about Windows 10 another time, but suffice it say it’s like trying to run a busy airport from your grandparent’s attic.