I know it’s bad because I know what can happen on the other side of those emails when an unhappy person like myself starts marking those emails as spam (which is what they are, at this point, since I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t want them). If enough of us report the company as spam, their emails start getting blacklisted, and then they can’t send emails to legitimate clients. I know, because I’ve had to help companies get off of those blacklists, because they weren’t practicing safe email habits. Getting off those lists can be difficult and time consuming–at least for a small business, if not for this particular company.

Although it initially may feel intimidating, it really isn’t hard to get yourself or your business set up with some safe email habits and practices. It’s not enough anymore to send an email to a large group of people and just use BCC (and woe if you use CC instead of BCC!) to “protect” yourself. And honestly, in this day and age, it doesn’t look professional, either. And there are legal issues, too! Helping a blogger or business get started with proper and safe email marketing is actually a lot of fun.

My preferred email marketing company is MailChimp, and I’ll tell you why.

Because they’re awesome, that’s why.

Back in 2008, I was setting up a website for a church which was ditching monthly print newsletters for weekly emails. At this point, this was uncharted territory for both of us, but I did know that we needed to really do our homework on how to do it right, since the church had been mistakenly blacklisted before. Even though I knew how I was going to send out the emails (using an extension built into the website, which was not running WordPress–and I’m just going to say that doing the emails this way was not a great idea. Much better in theory than in practice.), I wanted to make sure that I was doing everything the best way I could. I found this incredibly useful page of resources on this random company’s website:
At this point in time, I had no interest in using MailChimp’s services, but I was totally impressed by their “pay-it-forward” attitude of freely sharing information. And I like the chimp. The guides really helped us set up a good routine, and helped us know what pitfalls to try to avoid.

Two years later, we were looking at a do-over of the website and I discovered that our solution, which we were going to have to ditch anyway because we planned to move the site to WordPress, was not working out as well as we’d hoped. Users were not able to be easily removed from the list, and the email account from which the messages were being sent was not checked as often as it could be. It’s a bummer to log into an account and see messages that say “I’ve asked four times to be removed from your list!”.

I knew we needed a better plan. I knew we needed professional help. I remembered the guides. Who wouldn’t want to sign on with a company like that? So we moved to MailChimp, and it’s been one of the best things we could have done.

Why MailChimp is awesome.

This post has gotten longer than I’d like it to be, but I’d like to throw a list out of reasons why I love MailChimp:

• Their website is spunky.
• They make good looking emails super easy to produce.
• If an email address goes bad and I can’t send to it anymore, it’s automatically removed from my list.
• If someone wants to unsubscribe, they can. They don’t have to offer up their firstborn, ask four times, or make a phone call. They just ask and they’re off (make a note, pesky fitness app company).
• If I ever have a question, they quickly and competently answer it.
• Need an archive of your emails posted to your site? They take care of that, too (I’ve tried to find this feature on another email marketing site and have had no luck).
• If you have a small list, aren’t sure about getting into email marketing, or just send emails periodically, MailChimp is free. The only price you pay is having their logo at the bottom of your email, and since they give you several options from which to choose and they’re all pretty, I’ve got no complaints.
• With Google Reader being killed off, and Feedburner in a bit of a precarious state, MailChimp is a great choice for bloggers who want to share blog posts by email.
• Even better, their RSS emails can come very close to matching my website (due to the limitations of email, it’s not exact, but super close)–and once they’re set up, they’re totally automatic.
• You can use MailChimp for RSS emails or full fledged email campaigns, or both!

I use MailChimp to share my blog posts. If you like random emails which cover everything from pictures to basic WordPress tutorials to things I’m learning about code, please sign up for my email list right here (if you’re in an RSS reader, you will need to come visit the site to sign up). I never share your address, and if you want to leave, I promise I’ll let you go.

Sign up for My Email List

I haven’t seen spring for about a dozen years and I think I’m in love.

I wish that they could have loved each other in person.

I am grateful for my mother’s legacy, both in me and those who knew her…and in this girl.

The picture of my mother was taken by my father on a summer vacation about twenty years ago. The picture of my daughter was taken two weeks ago when she accidentally stepped into the frame. I’m thankful.

If you have a blog page (like mine) with just part of the post content displayed, that is frequently done by setting a content limit (say, 300 characters), and WordPress automagically adds a “Read More” link at the end of the content limit.

The More Tag

use the more tag to control your excerpts

<!--more-->

It’s also a button in either editor so you do not have to remember the fancy code. Here is what the excerpts look like, for example, in a widget on the home page of your website.

Add No Teaser to the More Tag

the more tag with no teaser

<!--more--><!--noteaser-->

If you add the “no teaser” tag to your “more tag”, your excerpt can say whatever you need it to, and it will be hidden from the actual page content. This comes in handy if your opening sentences are not as concise as you need for your widget on your homepage or your sidebar to be.

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter if you use an excerpt. When it matters, though, it can really make an impact–and when it really matters, you can really fine tune your excerpt with the “no teaser” tag.

Thanks, Rabia, for reminding me to share this tidbit!

Happily, Google led me first to Carrie Dils’ easy tutorial on how to set up sidebars for a custom post type. That was my first step and probably the easiest to get sorted. I knew I wanted the custom sidebars on both the individual episodes and on the novel’s archive page as well.

My next puzzle to solve, and the hardest, was to figure out how to handle the archive page. What I really wanted was a page that would not only show the episodes, but would also have at the top, a synopsis and/or instructions for how the serialization would work. I saw a recommendation for a plugin that would generate an archive page for me, but it absolutely did not work with my custom sidebars, no matter what I did. So I struggled with making a new archive page, messing with the loop, and honestly not succeeding.

Until inspiration struck, and I remembered the handy Genesis blog template and my preferred trick to have the content and the posts. It’s possible to use the blog template to pull not only a specific category, but to change it to pull a custom post type instead. In this case, my query_args custom field became “post_type=quartz” (the name of the post type). At this point, I was mostly done, since now I could set up a page to pull the custom post type as a blog feed, Rabia could put her synopsis at the top, and fill her Quartz-specific sidebars with whatever widgets she wanted–like a table of contents.

The final trick was to hide the post info and meta fields on my new archive page, which I could not do with PHP since I was using the standard blog template (if I did modify that template, it would mean that Rabia couldn’t use it for other things, which would be unfortunate). This was easily done by adding a custom body class to the page and using some CSS to hide it.

I’ll confess, I wasted quite a bit of time sorting through this one, and my online searches for answers didn’t show this as an obvious solution (so either I’m alone in wanting to do this or it was more obvious than I thought). In case I’m not alone, I thought I’d share my experience so someone else can benefit.

I think you might also enjoy reading the novel! Go on, check out Quartz today! (Since today was the first episode, you won’t even be behind.)

However, it’s possible to finesse the use of this a little bit by making a blog page for a specific category (or categories). Sometimes I just use this so I can show posts from a category without the link showing category/name-of-category/ (because who needs that?). I can also use it to set up a page that pulls posts from more than one category, which can come in handy.

Now, my issue is this: if I use the blog template on a page, it works excellently well for displaying the posts, but if I want to add introductory content to explain the category, it won’t show. If I skip the blog page and just use the category link that I don’t like, I can go into my categories and give them descriptions and SEO friendly titles (but what if I want a picture? or a form? and my clients may not remember to change the category info either), and I should do that anyway, but usually I would rather have that page, and get the best of both worlds: my content AND my posts.

Happily, Genesis allows me to do that, if I copy the page_blog.php file from the core Genesis folder, add it to my own theme folder, and add this line:

add_action( 'genesis_loop', 'genesis_standard_loop', 5 );

It has to be before the line that says genesis();, but that’s it. Now, whatever I put into the page content shows above the most recent posts.

SM2 FISH info and news (click to enlarge)

I just finished a project with custom post types, and this trick solved a myriad of problems for me there, too. Since it’s one I use all the time, I thought I’d share–I know others need it, too. I am planning to share some of the lessons I learned in the process–namely, don’t make your job harder than it really is.

Since I do use this all the time, and I know I’m not the only one, I’ve actually asked StudioPress to make it standard. Hope they do, but if they don’t, it’s an easy fix.

After I caught my breath, I went digging to find the culprit, although I was pretty sure I knew. Sure enough, my client had forgotten the instructions I’d given for preparing images for the site, which was now rapidly reaching critical mass.

Here’s the thing. Images are large, larger than ever nowadays. Thankfully, hard drives are large, too, so we don’t usually worry about how big the images are. But when it comes to putting images on a website, it’s really important to make sure that what you put on the site is lightweight so it loads quickly for your reader. I have a DSLR which takes lovely images, and the files are ginormous. But you don’t have to have a fancy camera to end up with a large file—the images coming out of the camera on my phone are routinely 3-4 megabytes. If I put up a post with ten of those images, that one page suddenly “weighs” 30-40 megabytes in pictures alone. If, however, I take the time to prepare those images, they’ll each weigh in at more like 100-200 kilobytes, which makes the entire page 1-2 megabytes. That’s what, 5% of the original? It’s a huge difference on the internet, and can mean the difference between someone enjoying your site and leaving it.

Put Your Images on a Diet Before You Put Them Online

First, check your media settings in WordPress. You can adjust the default sizes of your thumbnails, medium size images, and large images. Any time you upload an image to your site, WordPress makes copies of it at the sizes set here. This is its standard behavior, to help your pages load faster. I usually do not change the thumbnail and medium size images, but I will usually set the large to be one of two things:

1. The width of the content (here on my site, that’s 700 pixels wide). If you plan on mainly using full size images in a post, this is the size image you want to upload to your site anyway.
2. The width of your standard “gallery” image, which could be 720 pixels, or maybe 900 pixels. If you’re a photographer putting up great pictures, bigger is better, and this would work just fine. If you upload a lot of 900 pixel wide images but have your large setting at 720, then WordPress will make a 720 wide copy of each and every one of those images, which can, again, add up–so if you plan on doing a lot of galleries, make that be your large setting.

There are a lot of image programs out there which can help you resize your images. I use Lightroom most often, or Photoshop. You could use Picasa, Photoshop Elements, iPhoto, or even (gasp!) MS Paint. I’m not going to tell you how to resize (honestly, I’d have to figure it out myself in some of these programs), just what you should pick for your settings (if you can):

• Set your width to be 900 pixels wide. The program will figure out the height. For vertical images, you won’t want to go that tall, though—maybe 720 pixels tall.
• If you just need a small image, like the one I put at the top of this post, go ahead and save it at the size you need. That one’s 300 pixels wide.
• If you can set your resolution, pick 72 dpi. 300 is for printing.
• If you can strip out the metadata (camera model, focal length, etc.), do it. Lightroom and Photoshop can handle this easily and leave just the copyright info, if you’ve set it. If you don’t know what this is, or can’t find it, don’t worry about it.
• Not size related, but name your files something relevant to your content. Hint: DSC_0031 is not relevant. Search engines see your pictures—give them something to work with. Also, use hyphens or underscores instead of spaces in your file names—spaces won’t usually break the Internet but they can cause problems.

These are pretty basic tips, but they can make a huge impact.

don’t leave the title and alt text boxes blank!

So, how much difference can sizing your images correctly make? I spent some time cleaning up the client’s site, resizing images, and ended up with a new backup file that weighed in at 312 megabytes. That’s a 900 megabyte diet, which brings their site to a manageable size, makes their webhost happy (even with “unlimited” hosting, trust me, your host cares), and, most importantly, makes their readers happy.

Hope you enjoyed this little client tutorial. I’ll be adding more of these as I go along.