I have been using follow.it to allow people to get emails whenever I post something to the blog, but did now like it as it never led people to the blog. Instead they just copied the blog posting to their site and the person would view it there. So after looking around at all the other services that have the same sorts of issues, I cobbled together a solution that will work for me and may be even better.
I created a free Make.com account and used their tools to connect Blogger to Gmail. Now a new post will trigger a Make scenario which will then send an email to all the folks who have signed up. I put people's emails in the BCC field of the Gmail app for privacy. The Make scenario runs once a day and will only pick up the most recent blog post which is fine with me.
Next, I had to create an easy way for people to let me know they wanted to sign up. Blogger is pretty limited on this, but as a workaround, I set up their Contact Me widget and then hid it with a custom style "#ContactForm1{display: none !important}" in the theme. I can then copied over the widget code into my own HTML/Javascript widget and modified it to remove the name and message fields. Now I have a simple form with email field and a subscribe button. As an aside, I also use the fields in the custom widget to create a Contact Me page on the site.
So now what happens is I get an email when someone wants to get emailed on new postings which I then add to the Make scenario. For me this works fine as I am very low volume.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment