If something happens to Lotus Notes, what will happen to your newsletter? That’s the bigger question. Still is works for you.

As for the issue of “clicking another link”, an emailed newsletter is usually stuffed with tons of links, but the issue of saying “here’s our newsletter go visit our blog” is a different one. Some like that, allowing them to dig into more information if they want.

For you, this won’t work, but there is something that might. Using feed email services, you can email your blog’s feeds directly to subscribers. These can be customized to a specific category or the whole blog. It can be scheduled to be released daily or weekly, however you want it done. This would allow those who want to visit your blog by non-subscription methods to do so, and less work for your team to send a newsletter to those who do subscribe via the email feeds. The concentration would be back on content and now blog plus newsletter.

This particular group wants to stop their ineffective and costly production of newsletters. Your company relies upon them. So your need is not the same as theirs.

I realize I wasn’t clear when I made my comment about LotusNotes delivery. I work at a Federal Courthouse and the court personnel are now receiving a Library newsletter each week via LotusNotes. When they open the email they see the full newsletter. We do not want to send them an email with a link to a blog. Believe it or not, we feel strongly that our readers would not take that extra step of clicking a link to read a newsletter created using blog software. Lotus Notes will not allow us import the blog into an email message. Lotus Notes will also not allow us to send the blog via a email message directly from the browser. We’ve tried and the formatting breaks down and it looks pretty ugly.

We notice some legal news vendors (Findlaw; Law.com, etc.)sending newsletters via email but often the formatting suffers and/or images do not open. They look pretty awful and we are left to wonder if they ever tested sending their newsletters to Lotus Notes recipients! We don’t want our newsletter to suffer the same fate so for the forseeable future and unless/until our users become more sophistocated, we are stuck with the production process we know will work for us.

On a more positive note, I have used WordPress to successfully create two Blogs, one for Library Staff and one for Law Clerks. Because of the confidentiality of the content of these blogs, we have loaded them to our in-house servers and are keeping them private and off the Web. Our goal in using them in-house to create a better way to communicate and share information and I am happy to say we are succeeding.

Regardless of our situation, I am still very interested in reading your series. Thanks for your work on this!

The issue regarding articles in Pages is to “preserve” them, call special attention to them. But you are only calling attention to them for yourself. Not for your readers.

Think about it. How do new people find your content? Searches. They land on a web page on your site and are thrilled. They’ve found the answer. Do they know it’s a Page or a post? No. Do they care? No.

How do your regular readers find your content? Through feeds and a visit to your front page, or to a specific category of posts or category feed of posts. Pages are not included in your feeds nor categories, nor on the front page of your blog. Why bother?

Stop thinking print and start thinking blog :D

You can keep the newsletter going, as I’ve mentioned throughout this series, but if the cost of the newsletter, and the volunteers/staff to manage it change or need to minimize their activities, makes the newsletter a time and money waster, then convert it into a blog to keep the process streamlined and simplified.

As for linking to your article, you can include a link in a comment, or if the program you are using, like WordPress, has trackbacking enabled, a link to this post in your post will automatically generate a trackback link in the comments here, showing us that you wrote about this article.

Don’t work it too hard, this new blogging thing. It is actually much easier than you think. :D

Also, there are a lot of reasons to keep a newsletter in addition to the blog, and I have done so. I wrote about those reasons and referenced this article in my post today, but I am so new, I don’t know the proper method for linking to it, nor the proper ettiquite for doing so.

I enjoy your writing on WP and am glad I found this blog as well.

The process is copy and paste, not “export”, though that is possible, it requires a very high level of programming proficiency. Moving to a blog doesn’t make the past issues invalid. It moves forward towards eventually stopping the printed versions.

Bringing all past versions of a newsletter online would probably best be done by creating PDF versions of the past issues and adding those to the blog for reference.

Does that answer your question?

Thanks for starting this series, I can’t wait!

Yehuda