We realize that email newsletter subscribers might not be interested in each and every topic we write about on this website. Therefore, we are aiming to offer a bunch of email newsletter choices in a way that allows subscribers to easily add or remove themselves from various interest areas (rather than unsubscribe, which is always an option in any newsletter that we send out).
However, we send newsletters from functions on this website, rather than using a third-party provider like Mailchimp. We find that this is much more flexible as well as being more cost-effective and keeping everything right here on-site rather than on a third party’s servers.
However, there are certain limitations to any email newsletter sending programs and we’re trying to find a way to work within the few limitations of ours.
While it would work best, on our end, to offer a separate list for every combination of frequency preference and interest area which would let subscribers opt in or out of various lists with one click, that ends up being extremely cumbersome on the subscription page!
Up until now, we’ve mostly sent out digests of various content at various frequencies. However, we’d like to have more flexibility and are looking for ways to do this that work — for us and for our subscribers. Trying to publish a big, general newsletter on a quarterly basis wasn’t working out well.
We revised our email signup options in December 2024 so that the list checkbox options reflected interests with some dropdowns for frequency preferences and certain types of content. We’ve kept existing subscribers the same or close to their existing preferences.
Please note the following when you subscribe:
- We’re in the process of making our subscription forms on individual pages simpler. So if you subscribe on an individual post (and we’ve got to editing the form there) you’ll probably be subscribed to “All” or have options for subscriptions which represent the content on that page.
- If you subscribe to “All” AND other interest areas, you may end up with duplicate emails in a few cases. We try to prevent this from happening as much as possible but a few may get through…
- If you subscribe to digest formats for post notifications (weekly, monthly, etc) that will apply to every interest area you checked off. So if you subscribe to weekly digest AND travel, PNW, and trivia and we happened to publish something in all three areas every week you’d get three digests that week.
- We’ll be revising our digest emails in the near future as we publish new posts.
- Also note that this applies to email newsletters/post notifications. We have many different emails that go out from this website — the above does not apply to things like group/forum/comment notification subscriptions, automated emails for post authors, notifications about badges, etc.
Thanks for your interest!
