So I have now written eighteen articles for this daily email list. It’s been a bit rocky getting it automated and easy to send out.

My idea was to post a blog article on my Access JumpStart web site:

This was to kick off an automated email with the article content as the body and the title as the subject.

After looking around at a few different options for sending the email, I settled on ConvertKit (www.convertkit.com) after hearing the daily writing details from a few other authors interviewed by Jonathan Stark. He did a limited “Doing Daily” podcast where he interviewed I think 8 or 9 daily emailers.

Here is the podcast if you are interested: Doing Daily (transistor.fm)

So I got my free premium demo of ConvertKit set up and started adding the subscribers I had so far.

I also was able to set up some signup forms on ConvertKit and embed the forms in my Access JumpStart blog.

So far I’ve had to monitor things pretty closely because ConvertKit decided a couple of times not to automatically broadcast my email as I had set it up to do. But now I have become a paying member of the ConvertKit product, so I expect the automation I set up to check my WordPress blog feed and automatically send out a new email when it sees a new entry SHOULD continue working without interruption.

As far as actually writing the email, I am directly using the WordPress “normal” authoring interface (rather than the Divi Builder). I decided to do this to try to stay compatible with future versions of WordPress and my site, in case I stop using Divi and choose a different site builder.

I have a ticking red kitchen timer shaped like a tomato on desk and I set it for about 27 minutes (I never quite know what the spring will actually give me.) Then I start racing the clock to write and finish an article. If I’m sitting at my desktop in my office, I have typically been adding to my TDD series, but if I’m on my laptop or just don’t feel like doing TDD, I’ve been writing about my Access Development processes. So far that’s been all about how I use Version Control and why.

Another thread of an idea is to start a series on Access JumpStart which is a product we use at Halder Consulting to make our databases more consistent and give us a head start by having a menu system and system type features like logging to make our job easier. This product is offered on our web site and can be purchased, and adding more instructional information on how we use it and how it is intended to be configured and set up can only help make it more useful.

As soon as the timer dings (or before if I feel I’m already done), I go ahead and publish the article which allows the ConvertKit process to discover and send it, which typically happens within an hour.

So, spending about 30 minutes a day is my goal. I had to spend a little bit more than that over the past 3 weeks getting my process in place, but I think now it should allow me to simply write and hit publish! I look forward to continuing to share my expertise.