Hosted links to SignUp Boxes

December 4th, 2010 | Posted by John Goodell in ChurchPost Features | Useful Tools to Make Your Life Easier | What's New? - (0 Comments)

Wow – it’s been some time since we last posted to our blog, but make no mistake, we have been busy up to our ears! You may have already heard, but we launched (a few months ago, actually) our partner site SchoolPost.com, and have already signed on hundreds of teachers who are busy communicating with parents, students, volunteers and other administrators. SchoolPost is perfect for religious schools, non-religious organizations, and any other non-profit looking to enhance its communication.

All the while, we’ve launched some cool new features at ChurchPost.com – and this post is about one, in particular.

Our custom SignUp boxes have been a hit (released last June), and one feature request that’s come up over and over again is the ability to link text and/or images to a SignUp box. Well – the wait is over!

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By navigating to the SIGNUP BOXES tab, then clicking on the orange CODE button next to any of your forms, you can use a handy link we’ve created to point to your custom signup box wherever you want! This is particularly handy for text links in your emails (ex. “Sign up for our newsletter now!”), custom images on your website, or just because you don’t want to host the form on your site.

Check it out!

ChurchPost launches BitPost.Us – Social Network Sharing!

January 18th, 2010 | Posted by John Goodell in ChurchPost Features | Company News & Events | How are we different? | Useful Tools to Make Your Life Easier | What's New? - (0 Comments)

We are excited to announce the release of our new social network sharing feature.

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Next to each of your SENT messages, you will now see a small icon that automatically creates a short URL to your message.

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URL shortening is a technique on the Web where a provider makes a web page available under a very short URL in addition to the original address.

For example, the page:

http://www.churchpost.com/view_message?id=pp45dfdhyXd78dfs

can be shortened to:

http://bitpost.us/23ts

Short URLs are perfect for sharing content via a host of social networking sites!

Instead of using services like bit.ly or TinyURL.com, we decided to create our own shortening service called bitpost.us, or “Bit Post Us” – a reference to our company’s legal name Post Communications :)

In recent years, services like bit.ly and tinyurl.com have been attacked by spammers and the like, often times making these references (or short URLs) flagged by social networking sites and email services (like Gmail) as potential SPAM because anyone can create short URLs using them.

By creating our own shortening service, we ensure that only valid ChurchPost mailings get short links with the http://bitpost.us/ prefix, and that your messages are not filtered as SPAM when you post them.

By teaming up with AddThis, you can now share your ChurchPost.com messages with a host of over 230 communication services, including Facebook, Twitter, Digg and many more!

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Of course, you can use our short URLs anywhere you wish – simply click the SHARE icon next to your sent message and copy/paste the URL into anything! Clicking the link will automatically take your viewers to a web version of your message.

By using SHARE ChurchPost, we make it incredibly easy to post your message to the platform of your choice:

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Selecting Facebook, for example, automatically takes you to your posting page (or prompts you to login if you aren’t already) and includes the short URL and message subject. You can add your custom message and then post it!

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TWEET your message with one simple click!

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This new feature makes sharing your message even easier, without the hassle of re-creating it on every communication platform you use.

Remember, we only create short URLs for messages you decide to share. Otherwise, web versions are completely encrypted and only viewable by those who receive them.

Once a short URL has been created for your message (by clicking the SHARE icon next to your message subject), this URL will ALWAYS remain the same, and you can refer back to it any time by clicking the SHARE icon.

In the coming months, we will be vastly expanding our reporting section to include tracking of messages viewed by short URL and much more!

Happy communicating!

Team ChurchPost

Clearing your browser cache

May 11th, 2009 | Posted by John Goodell in Useful Tools to Make Your Life Easier | What's New? - (0 Comments)

Each time you access a file through your web browser, the browser caches (stores) it. In this way, the files (including any images on the page) do not have to be retrieved anew from the remote web site each time you click the Back or Forward buttons.

Unfortunately, this means that when we release new features (and fixes for old ones), your browser may still be showing you OLD content. You should periodically clear the cache to allow your browser to function more efficiently.

Internet Explorer 7

  1. From the Tools menu, select Internet Options... .
  2. Choose the General tab.
  3. Under Browsing history, click Delete... .
  4. Next to “Temporary Internet Files”, click Delete files... .
  5. Click Close, and then click OK to exit.

Firefox 3 for Windows

From the Tools menu, select Clear Private Data, and then check Cache. Click Clear Private Data Now.

Firefox 3 for Mac OS X

  1. In Firefox, from the Tools menu, select Clear Private Data.
  2. Make sure Cache is checked, and then click Clear Private Data Now.

Microsoft Word Cleanup!

February 4th, 2008 | Posted by John Goodell in ChurchPost Features | Useful Tools to Make Your Life Easier - (0 Comments)

Need to paste code from Microsoft Word into your email message? We just released a new feature that allows you to do just that – without all the hidden code that comes along with it!

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Simply select your content from Word, choose COPY from the EDIT menu (or click Ctrl-C), navigate to your ChurchPost window, select the Word Clipboard button from the button menu and PASTE (Ctrl-V) your content into this window. Voila!

Integrating HTML with iWeb (Installing your Get Connected Box)

August 9th, 2007 | Posted by John Goodell in Useful Tools to Make Your Life Easier - (Comments Off)

Apple’s iWeb is a nice simple application to make decent looking
websites very quick, at least if you can live with the limited layout
options and few templates that come with it. One of the big limitations
is that you can’t add any custom HTML code to the site.

This is a problem for ChurchPost.com users as it limits their ability to implement our handy “Get Connected Box” – customized code provided to every ChurchPost user to help manage their email lists.

Luckily, there’s a handy tool to help!

Jaap Kreijkamp has a great post on his Blog, including a free script/download that makes this incredibly easy to accomplish:

http://jaap.voetjes.org/Blog/FC58B20F-7DEB-4016-972A-85265CB44FA0.html

Exporting Subscriber Lists from Outlook

August 7th, 2007 | Posted by John Goodell in Useful Tools to Make Your Life Easier - (Comments Off)

One of the most frequent requests we get here at ChurchPost is how to get email groups FROM Outlook into ChurchPost.com.

If you’ve ever tried to use Outlook to send to a group of more than, say, 50 email addresses, you know how frustrating it can be. Equally frustrating is getting information OUT OF Outlook to use in your ChurchPost account.

Luckily, there’s a fantastic program that’s completely FREE to instantly export contacts and/or distribution lists from Outlook 2000/XP.

You can download a copy here:
http://support.churchpost.com/kb/article/000042

“Save Mailing List” is an easy-to-use program.

  1. Once you download the ZIP file to your Desktop, double-click it and then double-click the icon for SETUP
  2. Follow the prompts for installation (be sure to close Outlook before continuing!)
  3. Open Outlook and navigate to your CONTACTS
  4. If you want to export EVERYONE in your contacts list, simply highlight the first entry, hold down the SHIFT key and click the last entry. You can also use the CTRL key to select specific names and/or select a distribution list you have already created in Outlook.
  5. With the names you want to export highlighted, navigate to the FILE menu -> Save Mailing List -> Save as Mailing List…
  6. You’ll see a dialog box specifying the location of your exported list – save the list to your DESKTOP, choose a file name and select “Text file (.txt)” in the Save as type pull down menu. You’ll also want the first ‘radio-button’ selected (default) for “Save e-mails with name of recipient”
  7. Click SAVE and you’re all set!

Once you’ve completed these steps, simply send an email to support@churchpost.com with the .txt file attached and we’ll take care of the rest!