Extending Wordpress a bit more
For those of you who don’t know I use Wordpress to manage the content of my weblog. It’s a great program and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in starting one up. One of the things that I particularly enjoy (and that sometimes can be extremely annoying) about using Wordpress is hacking it.
Sometime ago I hacked Wordpress by adding a quick and dirty Email Notification System. This system basically grabs a list of email addresses that I created and keep updated and sends one email to each person on the list stating that I have posted a weblog along with a link to the front page of my weblog. Now, if we fast forward several months we can start getting to the point of this posting.
Back in April my Dad and I decided to buy my Grandmother a Mailstation. This allows her to have an email address so that we can all communicate with her via email. It’s been going great so far and I’ve been able to keep in touch with Grandma L. even more at times than other members of my family. So, this evening when I heard from her that she had heard from my Dad about my writings on this weblog she told me that she wished she could view the postings.
Now it only took me about two seconds to figure this one out. I could format a second email to those of my users audience whom did not or would not have access to a web browser. So, I did. And as of this posting, Grandma L. is able to recieve these postings.
Now then, I know what some of you clever people are thinking. How do I get on this miraculous list and save myself the bother of logging onto my weblog? Well the answer is that you don’t! For a couple of reasons:
- It’s only a click away from your viewing pleasure
- If you’d like to leave a comment you’ll need to be on the website to do so
- It’s much better for my search engine ranking (and my conscience) if I can check to see that you people still care about viewing these postings.
So that’s how I’ve extended Wordpress a bit more and it took only a few minutes.