Guild Foundation Press

   I finally figured out an excellent system of archiving my blog posts in a seamless way! The Original Green blog has over 220 posts, making it tedious to work with all them in the same folder… tons of scrolling past what I don’t want to get to the one I want to link to, for example. And because I’m starting to blog a lot of Walk Appeal material as I’m working on the book in earnest, it’s a big deal now.

    I googled “blog archive best practices” and didn’t get anything useful other than suggestions for the look of the archive. I then posted a similar question to Facebook on a couple occasions and got helpful responses from Kaid Benfield, Andy Malone, John Massengale, and Hazel Borys. From their excellent input, I was able to piece together the following:

Andy linked to a blog which included a page where every post is listed by title. That would be enormously helpful to me, allowing me to hunt for my own posts for linking later. There are two basic types of blog posts: timely posts, and evergreen posts. Timely posts are those based on current events. Evergreen posts are those based on principles, and which may be useful for years. Most of my posts are evergreen, because I’m more interested in lasting principles than things that are temporary. Some of my posts might only have a few hundred readers after a week, but to my surprise, they may have several thousand a few years later. Because evergreen posts don’t have an expiration date, I regularly link to them years later.

Unfortunately, Sandvox (my Mac-based web platform) has a hard limit of just over 200 on the number of items that can be shown on a “titles & summaries” object, which is the element used most often for blogs. You can display entire posts, parts of posts, just post names, etc. 200 works and 300 doesn’t… I didn’t experiment with all the points in between. That meant that Andy’s idea wouldn’t work for me either right now or some time in the near future. But I discovered that I could put multiple titles & summary objects on one page, making it possible to essentially do a blog for each year, since there’s no chance I’ll ever blog over 200 times in a year. So I can replicate the page Andy linked to. Very useful. Here it is.

But there are two problems with this approach: First, moving all the 2008 posts to a new blog named “2008″ (or whatever) means that each post will have a new URL. That will break all existing links to the page and delete all Facebook comments, which are tied to the old URL. It will also reset the page counter to zero. The second problem is that if I display just the most current year in my main blog window, early in the year it will look like the blog is almost empty.

Something Hazel said in her comment got me to wondering “is there any chance I might nest Sandvox blogs?” I tried it, and it worked!! This was the major breakthrough. Sandvox has always been awesome about doing simple stuff that seems completely intuitive more than most software I use. But the ability to nest blogs meant that I could create a 2008 blog, a 2009 blog, etc… all the way to my 2017 blog, and when you view them in my default blog window, you’ll always see the ten most recent blogs, even if they spanned across years.

I’ve now rebuilt my blog that way. The Original Green blog now contains a 2017 blog, a 2016 blog, etc. But what about all the problems noted above with changing URLs? The URL of the Speed Burden post, for example, was originally http://www.originalgreen.org/blog/costs-of-sprawl—the-speed.html but is now http://www.originalgreen.org/blog/2012/costs-of-sprawl—the-speed.html. The solutions were tedious, but worth it, IMO. First, I went through every post and copied every comment and pasted them as text and avatar graphics under “Legacy Comments.” There is great value in many of those comments. They made the Original Green book much better; the commenters are almost like my co-authors, as the book is filled with their ideas.

I first considered the page counter reset to be a minor loss, because nobody on earth other than me would care about how many visitors each post had to date. But then it occurred to me that the number of visitors could be instructive to me about which posts were most successful, so I went about the monotonous task of copying that number off every post (using my browser, where the number is visible) and pasting it into the page in Sandvox. For a post that has had 6,475 visitors to date, the text is “6,475+” meaning that it’s that much plus however many the page counter shows. I didn’t do this when moving from iWeb to Sandvox in 2011, so for those posts, it’s “+6,475+” meaning that there were more visitors before 2011, but I don’t know how many.

The third thing I did took the least amount of time. I made a spreadsheet I’ll blog about later which includes the core URL I copied from each page in Sandvox (”costs-of-sprawl—the-speed” in the example above) then two other columns with the before and after URLs. With this, I was able to create redirects for each of the posts in about 2 hours. They are Type 301 permanent redirects. This means that any link to the old URL will redirect visitors to the new URL. Also, a 301 redirect means that if a visitor has the old URL bookmarked, it’ll change the bookmark in their browser to the new URL. One caveat: if you do something similar, you should create the redirects quickly so people looking for your work can find it quickly.

One other thing I should point out: Looking at it one way, your whole blog (including your most recent post) is an archive. Viewed another way, there is no archive… you’re just putting posts into multiple buckets by year (or month, if you blog ever day). This means you’ll never need to move a post and break a link again. Kudos, Sandvox!! 

   ~Steve Mouzon

   I'm making a change that will save me a thousand dollars a year... I'm moving my mailing lists from iContact to MailChimp. It started out purely as a money-saving move, but I'm really liking how MailChimp handles several other things as well.

   You might have read in New Media for Designers + Builders, which tells why a mailing list is one of the twelve recommended nodes of a New Media ecosystem for those of us who design and build. Before we get into the good stuff that MailChimp does, let's take a minute to talk about mailing list basics.

   I do two types of mailings: this one is a newsletter, which I'm re-committing to send out (almost) every weekend after a gap of several months. That's what you subscribed to, and I owe it to you to deliver useful stuff each weekend. And please let me know if there's a topic you'd like to hear about, and I'll be sure to cover that soon.

   The other type of mailing is the news release. When I subscribe to someone's news releases, I want to hear from them about stuff that's really newsworthy because I appreciate their work, but I don't want a steady stream of emails from them because my bandwidth, like yours, is limited. So that's what I do for anyone subscribing to my news release lists as well: I email them when there's something I think is really worth hearing... but only then.

   I've used iContact for several years, and while I generally like their system, there's no inexpensive way to use it because they charge monthly based on how many subscribers you have. I have over 6,000 subscribers to my lists, so I'm paying $88/month. Because I only send news releases when there's news, most of my subscribers may hear from me only once or twice per year. That gets pretty expensive per email.

   MailChimp has more choices. Right now, I'm on their Forever Free plan, which is for anyone with fewer than 2,000 subscribers. I have one big list, so it's the one I'll move last because all of my other lists don't total over 2,000. Above 2,000 subscribers, you can go two directions: their Monthly plan is similar to iContact's, where you pay according to how many subscribers you have. But they also have a Pay As You Go plan, where you buy email "credits," and the more you buy, the cheaper each credit is. One credit buys you one email to one person, so if you have a list with 100 people and want to send one email to that list, you'd need 100 credits.

   MailChimp begins with 300 credits for $9, which is 3 cents per credit. Here's their billing plan page, so you can see for yourself what the choices are. I'm planning on buying 200,000 credits for $1,000, which is a half-penny per credit. Yes, that's a lot of money, but I spend that much in a year with iContact anyway, and at the rate I sent mailings that year, those credits will last more than three years, so it's obviously a good deal.

   First, there's one thing I don't like that threw me off for a bit. Everywhere on their site, they talk about "campaigns." What's a campaign? I've heard PR people talk about advertising campaigns, but is this a long-running thing with many emails, or just one email? I experimented a bit, and it seems like you could do it either way, but it seems easiest if every email is a different campaign. But c'mon guys... we're not advertisers... we're designers and builders! With everything else you do so well, couldn't you be plain-spoken about this item?

   OK, now on to what I like. There are three big things, other than pricing. First, it's really easy to create a campaign... err... email. There are five pages once you create the "campaign:" Recipients, Setup, Template, Design, and Confirm. Each page is really self-explanatory, and stuff works the way you'd expect it to. iContact always seemed a little convoluted, and tried to push you to their pre-built templates (none of which worked for me).

   The second thing is the tone of the site. Other than the campaign thing, the voice seems really conversational and not at all corporate or PR. That's a good thing, because most of us run as fast as possible away from anything that sounds like PR because we don't have the bandwidth to sit through one more sales pitch.

   The third reason I like MailChimp is something called Groups. This lets a person tell you several things about them. For example, I have three groups titled "I've bought," "I am a(n)," and "I'm interested in." Within each of these, there are "group names" (think of them as sub-groups). Within "I am a(n)," there are things like "Architect," "Builder," "Developer," "Engineer," etc. There's one thing I haven't yet figured out, and that's the easiest way to invite people to tell you more about them after they're already subscribed. That'll be the subject of another update in the not-so-distant future.

   ~Steve Mouzon