LetterPop

The LetterPOP user community is bustling with teachers and students.  We are very happy to have you using the application.  Some new features are in the works (more later).

We are going to create a “teacher” level subscription, for a small annual fee.  The teacher will get an admin section to add all of their students, and then print cute little ID cards for the kids.  The students will not have to use an email address with the teacher plan.

We need to price this so that its economical.  We are considering $39 per year for a whole classroom license.  Can you help us figure out the price?  Also, if we created a “whole school” license, can you help us determine how to price that?

Thanks!

Hey there Letterpoppers! We’ve noticed a consistent problem with newbies who sign up and can’t get a confirmation email.  We know that about 10% of you just don’t get that first email because of your spam traps (hotmail seems bad).  But, we have a lot of folks who mistype their own email address.  If you do that, then you can’t get the login, of course!

Also, if you send an email to support, please add your email address (even if you use the “having a problem” function).  We can’t reply without an address.

For those of you who don’t get your confirmation email, try to add letterpop.com as NOT SPAM to your email provider.  Every time our users mark us as not spam it will help us be recognized on your ISP as a whitehat user.

For the 10% of new users who don’t get an email, just use the “having a problem” feature and we’ll turn your account on manually.

Hey folks, are you ready for a cool way to cheat our system a little? Here’s the deal. When you are a free member, you only get to send a few newsletters. This is due to the cost of the servers, bandwidth, spam compliance, etc. But, you can make a newsletter, and then take the published URL and tweet it out to your followers. Cool idea, eh?

Teachers: yes, there are thousands of you using LetterPOP, and you all ought to be making your students and parents follow you on Twitter so that you can just pump out an occasional tweet and everyone get the message without the messiness of emails. Add to that the fact that you can tweet a newsletter with pictures of the kids working hard on a craft or just an update of class events.

While you are at it, tweet that you need some stuff donated from parents like tissues, hand sanitizer, pencils, and craft paper. Get the parents following you and use Twitter for a nifty and efficient communications tool, and a good way to tweet out LetterPOP newsletters.

One more tip: use bit.ly or tiny.cc to shorten your letterpop.com newsletter’s URL, and you can use their service to track your clicks.

(one more tip: we’ll be adding a built-in tweet function in the Spring of this year)

Hey everyone, we’re excited for a lot of upcoming things as well as two things right now: Facebook and Twitter!

Follow us on Twitter for the latest news, quips, and specials. You can also fan us on Facebook to give us feedback and let everyone know how you use LetterPOP!

We’ve just rolled out the ability to create a copy of an existing newsletter. To make a copy of a newsletter, go to your newsletter management page and then click the little green plus sign (+) next to the newsletter you would like to copy. A new draft copy of that newsletter will be created.

We’ve also tightened up the menus on that page. Hold your mouse over any of the icons to get a reminder of what it is for. And your drafts are now listed with the most recently modified newsletter first.

We hopy you like these changes. Let us know if you run into any issues. Thanks!

Today we fixed a problem that was affecting some users trying to integrate FeedBurner with their profile feeds. FeedBurner was reporting that the feed could not be found in some cases. Fixed! Please let us know if you find any issues with your profiles, feeds, or newsletters. Thank you!

What’s all this profile/feed stuff I’m talking about? Every LetterPop plan (including the Free plan) comes with a Profile. You can view and edit your profile from your account page. Here’s my public profile: John’s profile. Your profile lets you tell the world about yourself and you can choose to share as much or as little as you like. In addition, any public newsletters you publish will be listed here and are included in your own personal newsletter RSS feed. In a nutshell, RSS feeds let people who use them get automatic updates whenever you publish a newsletter. You can find out more about RSS feeds and why they are awesome right here.

We had a short period of unscheduled downtime this afternoon. We’re sorry about that. On the upside, all of your data was perfectly safe and up until today we’d had 351 continuous days of uninterrupted service. Not too shabby, but we’ll try to do better. If you have any concerns about the downtime, please contact support@letterpop.com. Thank you.

We know some of you have been having problems with duplicate comments being added to your newsletters. We think we’ve fixed the problem and removed the duplicates. Please let us know if you are still having problems with duplicate comments. Thanks!

We’re still putting up several new templates a week.  Here are a few selections from this week.