Loyal readers may have noticed that our weekly newsletter has not landed in your inbox for the last two weeks. Maybe you didn’t notice, but it was certainly a great concern in our office. We can only hope the problem is corrected on the next sending. We’ll go over the supposed reasons it hasn’t been sent according to MailChimp, the email provider and what our plan is going forward.

There are four separate blogs involved in the weekly newsletter. We’ve been told so many “best ways” to do it by MailChimp that it makes our heads spin. Even worse, each of those “best ways” has failed on multiple occasions. One answer was to use a service that combines each of the four blog feeds into a single feed. MailChimp even had such a service in the past until it just stopped working. They suggested we get another service and one of the recent failures is because they claim that feed had no new posts in it. We know that is false as we had looked in the feed.

Last week we switched things to a completely different method. This time the failure was blamed on MailChimp not being able to read the feed directly from our server. We are certainly very skeptical of their answer given the repeated failures.

With any luck, this post will be the top post in the next weekly newsletter. We’re trying yet another method. Of course this method has also failed in the past for different reasons. If it works, we’ve included more posts than normal since the last two weeks didn’t go out. Sorry for all the extra posts, we just don’t want readers to miss anything.

We certainly hope all the failures are behind us. If not, we’ll have to search for a new provider that is far more reliable.

Photo by John Schnobrich