TipsFromTony 2.0 is Here!
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006Welllll, actually, it’s more like version 5.0 by now:
- Version 1.0 was faxed to a handful of people using the very earliest Mac-compatible faxmodem ever offered. I think that it was around 1986. I just wanted to test out the technology for a single, bogus “newsletter”, but then everybody started demanding MORE!
- Version 2.0 was handled by e-mailing people using my AOL address book. Most of my clients were annoyed at the very idea of “e-mail”… It was too newfangled, and didn’t involve paper (Dead Tree Technology)! I spent a lot of time convincing people back then that e-mail was The Coming Thing. Managing the addresses quickly became painful as more and more subscribers piled on, all over the world. Mac users were online at long last, and they were frantic for any kind of online community.
- Version 3.0 was the BIG one (named Mac*Chat, with almost 100,000 readers), using a unix listserv from out of Texas. It grew that big in a year and a half! Then, I trimmed it WAY down and renamed it to TipsFromTony:
- Version 4.0 used the free OneList service, then
- Version 4.1 used eGroups, and then
- Version 4.2 used YahooGroups, as each company consumed the one before it…
So, I’m moving to the next level higher after twenty years of newsletters, and I’m dragging y’all with me!
I’ve decided to use my own mailing system (blessedly free of Yahoo ads) to send out better-looking, interactive e-mails, mostly pointing everybody to a web-page where you can add comments and continue the discussion. I’ve been getting many, many replies in response to my postings, and I haven’t been particularly rigorous about re-posting these golden nuggets of wisdom in the past. Now, I won’t have to manage stuff like that manually any more, and everyone will get the benefit of each others’ generosity and experience.
Frankly, I’m several years overdue… Blogs have seemed sort of wierd and newish compared to the simplicity of sending out an e-mail, but I read a LOT of blogs nowadays, and I certainly have what it takes to keep a popular, well-read site. It’s time for information to flow in both directions.
Honesty compels me to give full credit to my husband Dennis for the design and quality of the website, blog, newsletters, business cards and everything else that you’ll be seeing from now on. We’ve been together 16-1/2 years (and we were married back in 1991). His vast experience as a founding web-editor and designer for the San Diego Zoo’s phenomenal website is all gravy for my business too, as you will see in the years to come.
So, thanks for your patience, and I hope that you stick around!
