It’s another busy week here at RightSite’s Secret Laboratory located in a natural underground cavern 20 leagues below the earth’s surface somewhere between Malone’s and the Big Bamboo, and we are committing the kind of mistakes that prove how overworked we are.
Automating Our Email Newsletters
In a major technological leap forward, today was the first day that RightSite’s email newsletter was completely automated. We select the stories and property listings that are to be included in the newsletter, and then the formatting and distribution of the newsletter is all taken care of through an online application.
This means the work that used to require a half-day’s work by someone who knew their way around HTML code and content management systems is now done  automatically. Not bad.
Of course, few technological breakthroughs come without collateral damage, despite our utopian visions of the future. Â The damage in this case is that the links to the articles in today’s newsletter were broken. Our apologies to our frustrated readers. Â There was an error in the code that broke the links, and this has now been fixed. Â Rest assured that when next week’s newsletter is automatically generated and sent, that it will work properly.
In case you are interested, RightSite uses MailChimp for creating and distributing its email newsletters. The content for the newsletters is now carried through RSS feeds.
Newsletter Archives and a New Contact Form
In addition to the new newsletter system at RightSite, we have also added an archive of our email newsletters to RightSite. Â The archive is also updated automatically, and will show you the content of our current and past newsletters just in case you missed one.
At Mingtiandi, which often serves as the sandbox for our RightSite development, we have also added a few items this week. We now have archive pages for our weekly newsletter, as well as for our daily newsletter. Plus, we added a contact form so that our readers can write to us more easily, and spammers can be kept locked out.
We expect to be making a lot of improvements to our sites this year so that we can bring all of you more of the China real estate information that you need (while spending less time writing HTML newsletters).
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