New Riptide Newsletter through Subscribe2

We’ve just launched a new weekly newsletter to keep you informed of what’s going on with the Riptide team.  We’ll often have prize giveaways with the newsletter and for the April 6th newsletter the winner will get a case of Mix1.

Note that the weekly newsletter will only have news from the Riptide homepage and not our blog ramblings.

Go to the Riptide homepage to read more or to sign right up go here:
Click Here To Sign Up For Weekly Newsletters
If you’re just interested in joining our newsletter then you don’t need to worry about the rest of this post. I’ve written some details below to help other people implementing the Subscribe2 Wordpress newsletter system.
Subscribe2 is a Wordpress plugin that automatically emails a newsletter with your blog posts to your subscription list.
Loading the Subscribe2 plugin went smoothly except for when I went into the settings to set when our newsletter would be sent out. I wanted it to be sent weekly which there was an option for as well as at 11am which there was an option for. Unfortunately once I set this, the time for the newsletter to be sent one was automatically set for 1 week from when I made the adjustment. This was a problem. With our team racing on weekends I wanted the newsletter to get sent out on Tuesday which would allow time for us to write a post on our weekend results.
So I went hunting around the PHP files and database for a solution.   I eventually found the information that I was looking for and here it is how to make the adjustment if anyone out there is trying to do the same thing.
Go into your database and in the wordpress database look for the wp_options table.   Search the option_name field for “cron”.

Cron is Wordpress’ way of running a cron job.    A cron job is normally stored through a website’s cpanel to run a specified webpage at certain times.   This way, scripts can automatically run without having to physically go to a webpage. I use this on my business’ site to perform a few tasks that need to be done regularly.    Wordpress has created an effective workaround in place of having users store cron jobs on their cpanel.   Whenever someone goes to a site that runs on Wordpress, when the page loads, the “cron” field is checked to see if anything needs to be done.   That explains what the “cron” field is, here’s the adjustment you’ll want to make.
Click to edit “cron” and close to the end of the “option_value” field you’ll see some code that looks something like this:
i:1270458000;a:1:{s:14:”s2_digest_cron”;
This is where your newsletter’s next dispatch time and date is stored. What’s peculiar about this if you’re not familiar with PHP is that it’s stored as a PHP timestamp. In the world of PHP, time started at 00:00:00 on 1/1/1970. Since then, add a second for every second that goes by. As I’m writing this, we’re up to 1269892317. So to adjust when the next email is send, add or subtract 3600 for every hour or 86400 for every day. This may sound odd, but it’s quite smart as it’s a great way to compare and do math functions on times. I wrote a PHP based work clock script for my business that uses a timestamp as it can easily determine time worked in a certain period. Instead of buying a clock in machine (which I learned are quite expensive), hourly staff just turn on their computer, log into our system, and click on “clock in” to start the clock.

Make sure not to make a mistake that I made.  I haven’t confirmed this with our 2nd newsletter but it seems that the newsletter is sent based on the UTC time and not the blog time as the Subscribe2 dashboard settings would lead you to believe.
Another adjustment I made was what posts would be included in our first Subscribe2 newsletter.
To do this, search the option_name field for “subscribe2_options”.

This is where your subscribe2 options are stored including options that you don’t have access to on the Wordpress dashboard. Since we hadn’t send out a newsletter since the fall, I wanted our first newsletter to include all posts since the start of 2010.
So I adjusted some of the information stored in the “subscribe2_options” to look like this:
“last_s2cron”;s:19:”2010-01-01 13:34:43″;s:15:”previous_s2cron”;s:19:”2010-01-01 13:30:27″

That’s it.  Hope that helps someone out there.