What is a Mail Chimp?

What is a Mail Chimp?

You might wonder, why, as you find out below, I am writing about software, the internet and technology. Before I jump into this article’s topic, let me explain. I do think technology is playing such an enormous role in my live and many lives of people around the world and has such a huge impact that, if we can create truly green technology, the vision of creating a sustainable and green way of living will greatly benefit and maybe be really helpful in the transition towards that. One benefit for me is that it allows me to provide information to others at a very reasonable cost and effort.

Today, much of technology, even the green one, has often the shortfall that it has desirable as well as disruptive effects to a sustainable social, ecological and economic balanced and thriving world. The Internet as a technology has shown such potential to support positive change and building community, that even with the many problems it might create, I do think it is a very useful tool. The big challenge is to design ecological technology, lets call it Ecotech for now, that is completely harmless and does not do harm. A technology that has a small energy footprint, is appropriate to a local scale, uses renewable resources and is accessible. More about this at another time.

Back to MailChimp. Working on Thrive On Green and offering the ability to stay in touch with interested readers and visitors of the site, I have been looking into a system that allows folks to sign up and provide their email address. In that way, you can receive emails with the latest posts and information on how to Thrive On Green.

There are different services available that have a number of different features and different levels of features. I had heard about Mail Chimp and right from the beginning liked their unique name as well as their humor. Now I finally checked it out further and have been working in the last few days on setting it up for this site.

I learned a few things I want to share:

• Mail Chimp is at the time of this writing free of charge for up to 2000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. That I have not found with other well utilized systems and helps when starting up.
• The online interface is fairly easy to use and understand, with plenty of documentation and online resources when questions show up.
• Mail Chimp offers different ways to integrate the sign up into your website, via links or Html and Javascript code with various features to select and copying and pasting code where you want it. I wanted to have an inline sign up form, that does not go to another page or opens a new window.
• The code from MailChimp I used to achieve that had several shortcomings, some in the functionality, but mainly in the way I could modify the looks and user friendliness.
• Next thing I looked into a plugin for this site and selected a free one. The installation was super easy. All the code is accessible and can be modified. Again, the “as is” version, the layout and user experience, did not seem to be too great. So I dug in and made a few changes. After a few challenges, now I am alright with how it looks and works.

If you find the material, articles, posts interesting and want to find out about other things coming forth in the future or just want to stay in touch, discuss various topics or receive additional information, giveaways (yes soon!) or finding out about tools, products, services and tips for thriving on green and taking steps towards a more sustainable world, please sign up at the top right. The frequency will be starting out at not more than weekly and for now contains much of what is new on the website. Down the road the site and the email content will diverge from each other and the frequency increase.

Let me know what your sign up experience is. When successfully signing up you will receive an email you have to respond to in order to activate your subscription.

Wish you a thriving green day!