Despite our social media presence, a sizeable chunk of our Hotchpotch open-mic members still rely on our email bulletin. Almost exactly a year ago, I started the task of building up a new distribution list after the collapse of the old system. Here’s the story of what’s happened since.
After emailing everyone on the list individually, many people wanted to stay on it, a lot wished to stop receiving bulletins, and several never responded at all. The initial technical hiccups have long been ironed out and the number of subscribers almost doubled from 34 to 63 over the past 12 months.
The old list was not compliant with GDPR regulations, so it was important to ensure the new one was up to scratch, and that includes the ability to unsubscribe at any time. The easiest way is to have a public Web page with this functionality.
As we now had a basic website, there was an opportunity to publish more information there, such as our meeting times and standards of behaviour.
When I started this endeavour, I would copy open-source templates and simply strip out any unnecessary sections. One principle I like to follow is what YouTube creator Tom Scott calls the art of the bodge: cobbling together just enough code to do what you need it to, making refinements as you go along.
After a while of doing this, I slowly began to refresh and update my knowledge of HTML. Alongside that, I learned when and how to deploy CSS and JavaScript. The last time I dabbled in coding was many years ago before such elements were commonplace.
Perhaps I’ve been influenced by writing verse for so many years, but I can see a correlation between writing poetry and writing computer code. Every word has to be precisely the right one, each section is demarcated by curly brackets into its own ‘stanza’, and a detail as small as an incorrect line break can change how it’s interpreted.
But unless something in this current system breaks and has to be recoded, I”m leaving it alone, however poetic it reads.
Gavin Cameron 