For anyone interested, here are details about publishing this website. Along with email creation and email delivery. Your mileage will vary, of course.

I use these tools to publish and maintain the website:

• WordPress with plugins.
• ACF/SCF plugin for custom fields on various pages.
• Updraft Plus plugin for daily website backups.
• PublishPress Pro plugin for author data on magazine articles.
• WP SimplePay plugin to process contributions.
• W3 Total Cache plugin to improve website speed.
• WordFence plugin to fend off malicious site activity.
• Logtivity plugin to track website uptime.
• Top 10 plugin to track most active website pages.
• Cloudflare CDN (Content Delivery Network) for web page content delivery.

For email delivery, I use Sendy set up on this web server and AWS. It’s far less expensive and complicated than MailChimp and other options. The downside is that AWS took awhile to configure. And sending can take longer than with third party services. I created a custom WordPress template that displays each email wrapped in the appropriate email-friendly HTML table code. I copy paste the source code generated by the template to then drop into Sendy for testing and delivery.

For the HTML email template code, I reverse engineered several email newsletters that I receive. In addition to looking at the code used by my original newsletter service, Ghost. I’m also supposed to be an expert in coding HTML email, at least in the 2000s into the 2010s, with two courses at LinkedIn Learning that are still up.

I use Opalstack for website hosting. I cannot recommend them highly enough. They’re extremely knowledgeable and support requests are handled quickly in detail.

Building this version of the website took a lot of effort. I started with the Underscore WordPress theme and created a child theme. Then figured out the optimal information architecture using categories. Then coded templates. Then built pages and added content. I learned lots about arrays in PHP.

Last, I used the online service HemingwayApp to edit my copy. It gives me insight into sentence structures and help keeps my copy tight and focused.

For anyone interested in email newsletters, I started on Substack. But I found their page layouts too limiting. And I disagree with how they gather email addresses, many of them people not truly interested in a topic. Venture capital backed services also turns me off. As we saw with Reddit, investors eventually want their money back. That can have negative impacts on an online service. After playing with Substack, I next went to Ghost, a nonprofit. It’s a really terrific service. However, I found their email templates limited for my needs. I could not easily add features like Extras and STEM Classifieds to every email. That brought me back to WordPress. Specifically, it led me to build out my magazine website. To include the email newsletter 30 STEM Links with my magazine content.

If this sort of information interests you, feel free to ask any questions.

And none of the links above are affiliate links. I don’t really believe in that business model.