Jake Ludington

Over the weekend, I made some important changes to the newsletter. Some subtle changes to the layout should render it more readable in all mail clients. After some careful examination, I discovered changes to Hotmail were rendering the newsletter virtually unreadable, and numerous other quirks were popping up in all mail clients except Outlook, Outlook Express, and AOL. If your mail client is displaying the newsletter strangely following my recent design modifications, please let me know.
A bigger and ultimately more important change was made to the newsletter hosting. For the past year, I’ve been hosting the newsletter using an open source mailing list manager called Mailman. While Mailman works, it doesn’t make things like subscribing and unsubscribing from the newsletter as easy as they should be. From an administration standpoint, Mailman lacks many of the features that should make publishing a newsletter easy. Through a series of hacks, I managed to piece together all the tools I needed, but it ultimately increased the time required to maintain the list.
As of now, the list is hosted with Aweber. I chose their service in part because they offer some great features that make managing the email list easier for me. More importantly, I chose their service because they have an outstanding reputation of enforcing anti-spam policies on their clients and protecting the privacy of subscribers. Of course, the feature that will probably be of most interest to you as a subscriber is the improved subscription handling. At the bottom of every issue, there’s a link to the subscription options, just like there always has been. The improvement is the execution of subscription changes. Instead of the confusing interface offered by Mailman; Aweber offers a quick and easy solution for changing your email address or removing yourself from the list.