Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind the source for blindness news and information since 1907

Hello Everyone,

I hope you all had a nice week last week and a fun-filled weekend. Just as a reminder, for those of you who are not receiving the email version of the special notices and pen pals supplement, you can use the link at the very end of the magazine to read it in a secure section of our website. If you’re reading it on our website, be sure to select the “skip to main content” link right when you visit the page to jump over all of the headline links and get right to the supplement.

Also, it’s a big sports weekend coming up, and even if you’re not a Patriots or Giants fan, I think we can all agree that we should expect to get an entertaining game no matter who wins this rematch. I just hope that it isn’t a blow-out and that most of the commercials are, at the very least, tolerable. At $3 million for a 30 second spot, you would certainly hope so.

Other than that, it’s business as usual here at the magazine this week. We’ve got some great articles lined up for you, and please feel free to submit your comments to the Reader’s Forum by emailing me at editor@matildaziegler.com.

Take care, have a great week, and as always, thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Ross Hammond, Editor

Hello Everyone,

I hope you all had a nice weekend. For those of you in the Southeastern United States who are in the midst of these damaging tornados, I hope you are all safe.

As for where we are, we finally got some white fluffy stuff, though it will be short-lived with spring-like temperatures today and tomorrow. This really has been an odd winter so far.

Moving on to the magazine, it seems that the majority of you appreciated the link to the Special Notices and Pen Pals Supplement webpage at the end of the magazine, so we’re going to continue utilizing that until a better solution presents itself. If you have any questions about the web link, please email me at editor@matildaziegler.com.

That should cover everything for now. I hope you all have a great week. Take care, and as always, thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Ross Hammond, Editor

Hello Everyone,

I hope you all had a great weekend and that January has been treating you well so far. Here in Connecticut, we finally got our first bit of snow–though, by now, it’s already slush. At least it’s a sign that winter is still here and hasn’t been replaced by some strange extended fall season that eventually melts into spring.

Yesterday was also Martin Luther King Jr. Day–a time to remember a man who fought to bring together a nation. Not with guns and violence, but with words and love, and a hope for a better tomorrow. He was a great man in the truest sense.

Moving on to magazine news, as some of you already know, we are still experiencing spam issues with the special notices and pen pals supplement. Now that we are using the new email distribution system, I have contacted our support team and they are working on a solution. There are certain internet service providers who, for some reason, continue to block the supplement. In some cases, even with our new tracking options, we cannot tell what is causing the problem. The random behavior of this issue seems to be stumping everyone. We are vigilant, though, and I will not stop pursuing any avenue that may lead to a solution.

That said, you all still want your supplement, regardless of the email issues, and I understand that this has been frustrating for you. With the help of our web host, we’ve developed a secure, non-searchable page that will allow us to distribute the supplement through our website without any personal data being exposed to the population outside of the magazine. Starting this week and continuing until the email problem is solved, there will be a web link at the end of the magazine that will lead to the supplement page. That way, if the supplement does not make it to your inbox, you can still access and read the newest updates on our website. While it is not a perfect solution, it is the easiest way around the problem at the moment. If you have any questions regarding the new web link, please email me at editor@matildaziegler.com

That should cover everything for now. I hope you all have a great week. Take care, stay warm, and as always, thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Ross Hammond, Editor

Happy New Year Everyone!

I hope you all had a great holiday season and are getting back into the swing of things as we transition into 2012. As for me, I’ve mistakenly written 2011 as the date about two dozen times already, so I’ve yet to fully come into the new year yet.

Today is the first day we’re going to use a new bulk email service. The service is called Campaign Monitor and will hopefully solve–or at the very least curtail–the issues we were having with spam. You shouldn’t notice anything different with the email version of the magazine, but if you do find something out of the ordinary that you have a question about, please let me know and I’ll do my best to clear everything up for you. Our server host has used this service many times before, so I think it should be a successful changeover. That said, I am still planning to partition the magazine into two parts as we did before to verify that this new service works well for everyone. So for the time being, you will still receive two emails: the magazine first, and then the special notices and pen pals supplement afterwards.

Also, I would like to let you all know that due to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day next Monday, next week’s magazine will be released on Tuesday, January 17th.

That should cover everything for now. I hope you all have a great week. Take care, and as always, thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Ross Hammond, Editor

Hello Everyone,

I hope that for those of you who celebrated, you had a fun-filled holiday weekend. This time last year, I was telling you how wonderful it has been to spend a year writing and putting together the magazine for all of you. It’s amazing that another year has gone by so quickly.

It’s been two years since I’ve taken the helm here and I really feel like we’re in a groove, so to speak. Despite the spam issues we’ve experienced with our email editions, this year has gone smoothly and we’ve been able to reach more people than ever before. As I reported to our Board of Directors at our year end meeting recently, our magazine is now read in 141 countries and in 87 different languages. To me, that is the greatest statistic of all.

I hope you noticed that I said “our magazine” before, as well. This publication’s existence hinges on all of you. Not just as readers, but as interactive agents in its evolution. You are constantly helping to make this magazine better. Were it not for you all, as well as my incredible staff of writers for whom I am eternally grateful, what we have done in these past two years would simply not be possible. My vision for this magazine was always to offer something for the visually impaired, by the visually impaired, and I truly feel that together we have built something great.

So, with that said, I’d like to say thank you–to all of you. You have helped my vision become a wonderful reality, and I hope that you have enjoyed being a part of that as much as I have.

As I’ve said before, I’m going to start 2012 with a welcomed change that I hope will solve our email issues. Next week, there will not be a magazine released so that we can take the time to implement a new bulk email service. The first edition of the New Year will be released on January 9 with what I hope will be as few hiccups as possible.

I wish you all a happy, safe, and fun New Year. Take care, and as always, thank you for reading.

Sincerely,
Ross Hammond, Editor

Hello Everyone,

I hope you all had a great weekend. In speaking with the Ziegler Magazine writers, it has been decided that a magazine will be released next week. However, the following week–the week of January 2–there will not be a magazine released. The reason for this is so that we can make the transition over to a new bulk email management system that will hopefully eliminate–or, at the very least–drastically reduce the spam issues we’ve been having. At this time, I plan to publish the first 2012 issue of the magazine on Monday January 9.

That should cover everything for now. I hope you all have a wonderful week as we forge ahead into the holiday weekend and no matter what holiday you’re celebrating, I wish you all a fun-filled time with family and friends.

Take care, and as always, thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Ross Hammond, Editor

Hello Everyone,

I hope you all had a nice weekend. I don’t know about where you are, but winter has finally come to Connecticut. I was wise enough to make sure I tossed a pair of gloves in my car on Saturday. Scraping the thick layer of frost off of my car’s windows this morning would have been painful without them. Though, that said, it is about time that winter arrived. Sixty-five degree days less than three weeks from New Years were a little out of the ordinary.

We’ve got a great magazine lined up for you all this week, so I hope you enjoy the articles our writers have put together for you. As with previous weeks, the magazine will be sent in two parts, with the Special Notices and Pen Pals arriving in part two. If you don’t receive either part, please send me an email at editor@matildaziegler.com so that I can send you a copy myself.

Take care, have a great week, and as always, thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Ross Hammond, Editor

Hello Everyone,

I hope that all of you who celebrated had a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends and family. As we seemingly stampede towards the holiday season, I find those old feelings coming back again. The air is getting fresher, everyone seems to be in a better mood, and I have absolutely no clue what presents to buy for the various people on my list. I have a feeling that this year might be another last minute shopping spree as I whiz through the local shopping establishments like a wild man trying to find something–anything–that fits the personality of those I am buying things for. It’s at times like these when I wish the only gifts I had to buy were for my cousin’s young children. A couple fluffy, goofy looking stuffed animals and a fire truck and they couldn’t have been happier.

As I mentioned before, we are planning on changing over to a new email service in the near future in order to eliminate–or at the very least, drastically reduce–spam issues we’ve been experiencing. At this point, I would expect that we will have made our decision and implemented the change by the New Year, but I’ll keep you all up to date on the details. Again, none of these changes will require you to do anything and the process will not affect the way you receive the magazine.

That should cover everything for now. I hope you all enjoy this week’s magazine.

Take care, and as always, thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Ross Hammond, Editor

Hello Everyone,

As always, I hope you all had a nice weekend. I want to thank those of you who wrote in responding to the issues we’ve been having with the email edition and the possible solutions that I offered.

That said, after giving it some thought and reading responses, neither of those solutions are really good enough. I spoke again with our website host about these issues and he and I both feel that a new bulk email system needs to be researched and implemented–one that will allow us to track problem messages more effectively and one that offers better support during times when we experience difficulty. This change will not be implemented right away, as we need to make sure that whatever choice we make is going to serve all of you the best. I don’t want to choose too quickly and migrate everything over to a new system only to find that the same problems exist.

When this change is made, you won’t notice any changes and the email version will arrive normally. Hyperlinks and email addresses will still be active within the magazine and if everything goes as planned, there will no longer be a need to send the magazine in separate parts. This format has worked the best, so I’d prefer not to change it if we don’t have to.

Until then, though, the magazine will be sent in two parts. Again, there will be a delay between the two emails, sometimes as long as a couple hours. If you have not received one or both parts of the magazine by tomorrow, please let me know via email and I will send them to you personally.

Also, as just one final announcement, there will be no magazine next week (the week of November 28) and normal publication will resume on Monday, December 5.

I hope you all have a great week, and for those celebrating, a fun-filled Thanksgiving with family and friends.

Take care, and as always, thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Ross Hammond, Editor

Hello Everyone,

I hope you all had a nice weekend. As you know, last week I tried out a different method of distributing the magazine by separating the new content and the special notices and pen pals sections into two emails. By doing this, any spam issues connected to the special notices or pen pal submissions would not affect the receipt of the new magazine content. For a few exceptions, this method was successful, and many of you wrote in to me saying that you received both parts without issue. However, some of you still did not receive the second email with the special notices and pen pals, so the problem still persists.

For the first time since we began experiencing these issues, I was able to reach someone at both Verizon and Comcast, two of the most affected email providers, to talk to them about this problem. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, for the most part, they don’t know what’s causing the problem. The issue remains the same–some emails make it through, and some don’t. They aren’t blocking our IP address, so they don’t know why any messages are eliminated at all, let alone without even reaching your spam boxes at the very least. I’m still in contact with both providers’ departments who deal with these issues and we’re all working on a solution.

Which brings me to my next point–solutions on our end. Active hyperlinks are the problem-child of the spam world, which is why the special notices and pen pals sections are bearing the brunt of this issue. So I want to ask all of you if implementing a slight change would be acceptable. Rather than using the classic email or web address links in the magazine, I’ve received suggestions that we use john [at] email service [dot] com as a way of writing email addresses. Any web addresses would be written similarly as www [dot] website [dot] com. I feel that this change might be very helpful in eliminating spam issues with the magazine, but it means that selecting links directly from the magazine will no longer be an option. It will be a sacrifice of convenience while improving the ability for readers to receive the magazine.

The other option is to create a secure website, requiring login information, where the special notices and pen pals sections are updated. The login information would change weekly, and would be announced in my letter to all of you for that specific week. This would allow you all to see those sections with the active links imbedded, but you would not be able to do this directly from the email. For security purposes, this information would only be made available in the email version of the magazine.

Again, these are just some ideas we’re considering and they may become moot if any progress is made with these email providers. However, I would like your input on the matter if we do have to implement any of these changes. Feel free to email me at editor@matildaziegler.com with your thoughts.

In the meantime, I will be sending the magazine in separate parts as I did last week. The second part will begin sending after the first, so there will be a delay. If you do not receive the second part, please email me and I will send it to you personally.

Take care, have a great week, thank you all for your patience, and thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Ross Hammond, Editor