How to Build an Autoresponder – the Opt-in Form

How to create an email opt-in form in WordPressI wrote last week about how I decided a while back to see if I could build my own opt-in email autoresponder system as a WordPress plugin. The first part that I chose to figure out was the double opt-in component, which I will describe here.

Before I get into that, I want to point out some potential limitations of building an email autoresponder into a WordPress plugin. I don’t think the actual opt-in process will be that significant because it is only handling traffic that is already on the website. It just involves sending an extra email message and and an extra page load as the visitor completes the double opt-in.

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Quatre – Weekend Roundup IV

The Weekend Roundup shares some great blogs I have read and a few I have writtenToday is the first day of Daylight Saving Time here in the US. I did a little research about the practice of Daylight Saving Time around the world. It starts today for most of the countries who participate west of the Atlantic in the northern hemisphere. It spreads east of the Atlantic in a couple weeks, and it ends in about a month for our friends south of the Equator. I still get amused when I hear people, especially politicians in the government, say that they are adding an hour of daylight every year by doing this, as if they could actually affect the rotation of our planet by making us all get up an hour earlier.

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How to Build an Opt-in Email Autoresponder

I Decided to write my own opt-in form and email autoresponder for WordPressI decided about a year and a half ago to write my own opt-in form and email autoresponder plugin for WordPress. I decided today that I would share the adventure in a series of blog posts. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me explain what these are. Opt-in forms are those little forms you see on a lot of blogs and other websites asking you to sign up by entering your name and email address. Once you do that they may email you a free gift of some sort and they will probably send you regular emails with additional content and/or let you know when they have published a new post. The email autoresponder is the part that handles sending all of the emails.

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Tres – Weekend Roundup III

The Weekend Roundup shares some great blogs I have read and a few I have writtenHere we are at the end of another week, or the beginning of another week depending on how you look at it. Either way, it is time to take a look back at some of the interesting blog posts that I have read lately.

Last week all of the posts I shared were about blogging. This week is more diverse, only one of them has anything to do with the web at all. I’m interested in a variety of topics, as most people are, and these posts look into some of those other areas. Here’s the Weekend Roundup:

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Weekend Roundup II

The Weekend Roundup shares some great blogs I have read and a few I have writtenTwo weeks ago I decided that I was going to get three new blog posts written every week after being very inconsistent for a long time. Later in the week I decided I would also write a Weekend Roundup post here, promote some of the other bloggers that I have read during the week, and also highlight the content that I created during the week. Here we are at the end of week two of this new challenge and I have been able to stay on schedule so far.

I have read some very interesting things this week but there have been several about blogging and online marketing, so I’ll go with that as a theme. Here’s the Weekend Roundup:

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My First Weekend Roundup

This is my first Weekend Roundup post of what will hopefully be a weekly thing. Life may occasionally get in the way because I am a full-time stay-at-home Dad and I home school my kids, so that’s my first priority. With these posts I intend to share a handful of posts by other bloggers that I have read during the week and the ones that I have written myself on other websites. So without further ado…

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The Best Tool for Learning How to Meditate

Meditation can be very hard for someone who has never learned how to meditate or what it feels like to be in a meditative state. Guided meditation programs are great for getting you into a meditative state but I don’t feel that they teach you how to do it on your own, so they can become a crutch. I really like brainwave entrainment programs because they can help you go very deep or into very specific states, and I have a few of them, but like guided meditations, they don’t teach you how to do it on your own.

I believe that the ability to get into a meditative state, or a very relaxed state, is beneficial, I would even say important and necessary, and you aren’t always going to be able to have portable CD player to listen to your meditation program. Either you won’t have the time to use a program or you just won’t have it on you when you need it. So you want to learn how to relax yourself without being dependent on a tool all the time.

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Visualization – Can You Picture That

Visualization Can You Picture ThatCan You Picture That, performed by the Electric Mayhem in The Muppet Movie, is one of my favorite songs about visualization. If you want to create something, you have to see it first in your mind. As Bob Proctor has said, “Thoughts become things. If you see it in your mind, you will hold it in your hand.”

What does your vision of your future look like? What do you want to create? Have you seen it in your mind and imagined what it feels like? If you can’t see it, you can’t have it.

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Is It Safe, Essential, or Outright Dangerous?

Nutrition StudiesI read a great blog post by Brittany Bullen titled 21 Seemingly Harmless Things That Will Destroy You, Your Marriage and Your Children. It is hilarious, so I highly recommend reading it for a good laugh. It got me thinking about what we are told is safe, essential or dangerous, especially about nutrition and health care.

What you “know” about nutrition changes, sometime significantly, from one day to the next. New nutrition studies are published every day and they constantly conflict with one another. You should eat plenty of meat because we need the protein. Then you hear that you should not eat meat because humans have a vegetarian digestive tract. Then you learn that you must eat meat because a vegetarian diet cannot provide all of the nutrients that you need. Which is true if any of them?

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The Health Magnet

Health MagnetHave you ever considered using magnets to help with your aches and pains, help you get better sleep, or to just relax?

Magnets have been used since ancient times by  many cultures (the Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese, and Indians) to help the body to heal. Magnets are becoming popular now with athletes to help shorten their recovery time after training and performing an for relief from discomfort.

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