Today YLF will send its first monthly newsletter. We realized that many members go through periods when they aren’t able to visit the site regularly, and we thought it would be nice for people in this situation to receive a monthly summary of the interesting things that have happened here on YLF. The first edition will go out tonight and we look forward to your feedback and suggestions for future editions.
All email subscribers and YLF members will receive the first edition of the newsletter. You can opt out of future editions using the “Remove me from this list” link in the footer of the email message.
While setting up the newsletter we took the opportunity to make a few other improvements to our email communications system. Please read on if you use (or would like to use) email notifications or RSS feeds to keep up to date with YLF.
Changes to Blog Update Notifications
We are transitioning to a new email notification format for the blog. Actually, the transition started a while ago and we have been running two systems in parallel. Some people get an email update for every new post, and other people get a single update every morning (11am Eastern Time). Now that we’re often posting more than once a day we are going to move all subscribers to the one-per-day format to avoid overloading your inbox.
We will make the transition immediately and it won’t require any action on your part. Your next daily update will be in your inbox tomorrow morning. Please make sure that our email didn’t go into your junkmail folder — we use a very reputable email service, but sometimes the filters are very aggressive. One thing you can do to avoid this problem in future is to go to the footer of the message and click the link that says “Add us to your address book”.
If you aren’t already a subscriber to the daily updates, then please consider signing up.
New Store Update Notifications
We are creating a new email update system for the Store. This will work in a similar way to blog updates: once a day (in the afternoon, Eastern Time) you will receive an email notification if Angie has posted any new items in the store.
Once you have signed up for blog update notifications, it is easy to add store updates because all three email communications are now integrated. This means that all subscribers (email subscribers and YLF members) can go to one place to specify which of the email communications they would like to receive. Look in the footer of a blog update email, a store update email or the monthly newsletter for the “Update my profile” link. Clicking this will take you to a page where you can opt in or out of these three email communications.
RSS Feeds for (Almost) Everything
If you prefer RSS feeds to email updates, then boy do we have you covered. Here are the main YLF feeds:
You can also get an RSS feed for any individual conversation on the forum, a forum category, or an individual category on the blog. Just browse to the relevant page and click the RSS icon in your browser to see the feeds available for that page. The icon will look something like the one on the right.
You need a feed reader to use these RSS feeds. I like Google reader, but there are many other options. If you would like to learn more about RSS, then this video is a fun place to start.
Please feel free to send me a private message or use the contact form to get in touch if you have any questions or if you experience any problems with the newsletter, email notifications or RSS feeds.
