Colin Walker

I finally got to grips with Chapter 8 this morning and managed to work out what I wanted to say and the order I wanted to say it in. It's only a draft but I still felt blocked by the need to get it right rather than just get it done. It feels good to be moving on but I suspect I may have a similar problem with Chapter 9.

That's an issue for tomorrow. My writing session is done for today.

Instead, I hope to complete the muse-letter migration. I spent a little more time on it last night and completed the display template (you can find it here) which doubles up as the posting form when I am logged in — just as with the blog I wanted to keep it self contained, inline.

Next is the sign-up/sign-off flow, confirmation email generation and modification of the email list.

Just realised that I forgot the RSS feed generation which will also be on the main display/posting page. Still, that shouldn't take long.

UPDATE: Done!

With all this talk about the muse-letter it's entirely coincidental that the first one went out a year ago today. What better way to celebrate the anniversary?

I think I'm there! All parts of the muse-letter process have (as far as I can tell) been ported over and appear to work in my (limited) testing.

If anyone wants to help test before I migrate the email list and change the links you can do so here.

And that's it... I've made the switch — the muse-letter is now WordPress free. Everything is transferred and redirects are in place for old links and the old RSS feed (for those who use that rather than email.)

One small, but useful, improvement over the original system is that it automatically works out the next edition number based on the last one in the database, that way I only need to worry about the title and am not a risk of getting it wrong ... again.

Testing has all gone according to plan but I won't really know that everything is 100% okay until the next letter. Life on the edge, eh?