Great family travel accessory, Anker 10-port USB charger.

Family selfie at the Wisconsin Dells Kalahari Resort! Tyler’s blackeye memorialized.

Delicious Kingfield at Five Watt Coffee this morning. Heading out on vacation shortly.

At Martina for our first Gnocchi Night. Delicious.

Seeing Patricia Barber for the first time at Dakota Jazz Club. 🎶

Great start to Season 5 of Silicon Valley. 🤣

I’ve gone from being ambivalent about OmniFocus 3 tags, to now constantly thinking about how they will help me. Waiting… ⏱

Mazie passed through regionals and is now moving onto the statewide competition for National History Day. Very proud of her!

Delta website shows 708,984 lifetime miles for me. I’ll probably hit that Million Miler status in a few years. Don’t know how I feel about that. 🤔

Still thinking about today’s awesome lunch at Tori Ramen with Patrick Rhone. The Bali Bali! was amazing. The conversation was good too. 😁

Shredding paper like I work in the White House. 🤣

Steve Earle doing Copperhead Road at the Pantages! 👍🏻🎶

Backordered the better Marlon Bundo book. Made me chuckle that it’s on back order.

Getting crushed in UNO this morning. 🤪

Unlocked Izel in Alto’s Odyssey and set a new record run. 👍🏻

  • GOAL!!! Yeah Minnesota United! #MNUFC 1-0!
  • Wow — 3 rapid goals leave #MNUFC leading 2-1!
  • Nice home opener win Minnesota United!

👏⚽️👏⚽️👏⚽️

Cue Wonderwall! 👍

Why MailChimp for Weekly Thing

I’ve now completed the migration and automation of the Weekly Thing using MailChimp, and I’m very happy with how it has all worked out. Newsletters are experiencing a renaissance, so let me share why I moved from TinyLetter to MailChimp.

Be aware that TinyLetter was purchased by MailChimp. I don’t expect TinyLetter to get shut down, but I also don’t expect it to get any significant attention. TinyLetter is purpose-built for personal newsletters and ease-of-use. It is very easy to use, as promised, but it lacks power features that I knew I would want.

My move to MailChimp was driven by a few things:

  1. I wanted to customize the template for my newsletter. I make frequent use of block quotes and TinyLetter didn’t deal with those, neither did the standard MailChimp templates. TinyLetter doesn’t allow you to change the template, so I knew I would need to use something more powerful, and at some point I would need to author my own template. This a pain because dealing with HTML in email is really gross.
  2. I wanted to automate the process of creating the newsletter. I use Workflow to build the sections of the Weekly Thing. I also can use Workflow to access the MailChimp API to create my campaign, upload pictures and send the HTML of the newsletter. This saves me significant time each week.
  3. I knew that the advanced segmentation features of MailChimp may come in handy at some point. I haven’t used them yet, but it’s nice to know I can reach out to a subset of subscribers if I want.

MailChimp gives significantly more freedom and control, but it comes at the expense of additional complexity. When I first moved from TinyLetter to MailChimp, the time it took me to generate the Weekly Thing doubled or worse. I also had to use a laptop, since some of the tools wouldn’t work on my iPhone. Now that I’ve gotten my workflows updated, I can generate the newsletter faster than ever before, and once again I can do it all on my iPhone.

Taj Mahal

Virginia lost to the 16th seed? 😲 There goes my NCAA bracket. 🚽

My dog Chase got some teeth pulled today and he’s really not pleased about it. 🙁