Email Issues

It would appear that I messed up the email system with the last post. Hopefully this issue will not re-occur in the future since, I’ve added an automated check before updating the blog.

If you’re not technical then you can stop reading now and click through at the bottom of the email to previous post or click here.

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If you’re technical and care about what went wrong…

Mailchimp cannot deal with relative urls in the rss feed. This means that I have to tell Jekyll to use absolute urls. If I’m using absolute urls I cannot test the blog on my local machine since the links all point to the live site. I thought I had solved the issue by changing the config file with a script before serving locally and deploying remotely. Clearly something went wrong in the script (which works when I test it, you know the old “it works on my machine excuse”). I’ve now added a condition to the deploy script to only deploy if the absolute urls are present in the rss feed.

In theory this should prevent broken links in emails going forward, but if 20+ years in IT has taught me anything… This too will be proven wrong in the future.