YOUR WONDERFUL EMAIL NEWSLETTERSubmitted by Hilary Franklin on Wed, Sep 17 2008 - 15:15 |
Whow Francis, I am continually amazed and excited by what you produce - this new email newsletter
is fantastic - is it relatively easy to produce.
I am attending Module 3 in November and hoping to enlist some more members in that process.
I love the Faiclitator Aliases and the welcome to the new members. This maybe the way forward to sending new members
information upon joining.
Hilary
Newsletter production
Hilary, the newsletter wasn't too hard to produce as such, but getting it to be mailed out correctly took a lot of work. This is because the newsletter software isn't fully mature yet, so I had to spend time tracking down various obscure bugs.
I'll probably produce a document or screencast on newsletter production at some point. What I used was the Kompozer HTML editor, see http://www.kompozer.net/ followed by a customised HTML tidy-up program I wrote. Then invoke Create Content -> Newsletter Issue and the tidied-up HTML is pasted into the body box, then hit Save. Then Edit again and do Test Send to check the format. The final operation of sending to the whole distribution list is reserved to the Administrator due to its sensitive nature, but Author Users can do everything up to that point.
Not everyone wants to learn a new program like Kompozer (even though it is easy to use). So, it's worth noting that Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer (free) allow documents to be saved as HTML, and the text of the file saved in that format can then be pasted in as before.
Hope this helps. :-)
Module 3 in November
Please take some photographs and we'll add them to the Image Gallery!
Other media like audio and video would be welcome too, of course, but some aspects of such a workshop are rather sensitive and not appropriate to attempt to capture.