It’s fair to say I’m keen to get my message out any which way. As well as the blogging staples of RSS feeds I also have a print-friendly PDF Magazine version and a eBook addition in various formats (EPUB | Mobipocket/Kindle | PDF).  For a while I’ve also give an option to sign up for a monthly email newsletter. This uses the MailPress plugin to handle subscriptions and send a monthly update which snippets of blog posts from the last month.

One of the things I was never happy with was the layout of the email, which was basically a list of snippets of posts based on date order. As I uses this site to collect lists of links to news items and sites I find interesting in ‘What I’ve starred this week’ and more technical posts recording my personal research, there are times I would like to put these further down the reading order.

Fortunately MailPress allows users to use/create custom templates. Having tried to find a suitable existing template and failed I knocked together a new one. This allows me to highlight a featured post, followed by snippets of my regular posts, finishing with the list of links from ‘What I’ve starred’. With the lack of MailPress templates I thought it would be worthwhile releasing:

*** RSC MailPress template ***

You should read the MailPress documentation for more information on installation customisation.

[If you are testing the monthly template the plugin only pulls in a random older post. I’ve posted a workaround for this in the MailPress forum.]  

Last updated by Martin Hawksey at August 30, 2010.