3.0 Tip: Saving Your Newsletters & Other Broadcast Messages While Keeping Them White Label

[Fire-Tech]

I have been reworking some of my newsletters and decided to keep them available on my networks for members to have future access. Trying to stay as white label as possible, I came up with a way you may find handy.

As many of you know, making Newsletters and other Broadcast Messages can be challenging because you have to format them to look good in multiple browsers when displayed in member emails. I won't go over how to create Newsletters, but there are a handful of good templates other NC's have shared that can get you started. If you don't have Dreamweaver, Jen has a good WYSIWYG editor here that makes things easier for you as well. I'll show you how to do things if you don't have any HTML editing software.

Here's an example of a recent Newsletter shown the way I want and what I'll be using as a reference to explain things.

If you want to keep your Newsletters on your network for future member reference, you can use Articles, Blogs or Forums, but the CSS from your network screws everything up. You can of course strip conflicting CSS from the page, but that creates a whole different kind of a pain in the a$$.

Here's what the exact same code looks like as an Article (looks terrible)...

I have found that uploading the HTML file to your file manager and customizing the URL is the best way to keep things the way you want without displaying "Ning" file name in the browser.

Once you have your Newsletter or other Broadcast Message designed, save the HTML to Notepad (I also like the Komodo Edit free version if you don't have Dreamweaver)...

Save the file to your computer (you need to change the type to "All Files", and then add ".html" to the end of the name of your file).

Now upload the HTML file to your File Manager...

You will notice that HTML files give you the ability to customize/rename  the link (while keeping the original Ning file name as well)...customizing the URL will change it so the "Ning" file name is not show.....keeping it more "White Label".

Once you save the custom link, you will now have the custom link available when you click on the "Copy Link" button....along with the "Ning" file version... notice how the URL doesn't say api.ning.com...

Now the rest is easy... create a custom page or a sidebar somewhere on your network to display a list of the Newsletters or Broadcast Messages always available for members. Add a name for each of the newsletters you want to link to, and link the customized URL of the file you uploaded to the name! 

Hope that helps some of you!

Enjoy ;)

FT

[TJ @ jQueryHelp]

Very nice tip; thanks FT!

[Fire-Tech]

Thanks TJ :)

[Jen]

Nice tip, great idea!

[Fire-Tech]

Thanks Jen :)

[⚡JFarrow⌁]

nice tip for sure FT....i've been using a combination of codepen.io and Jens editor (mentioned above) for fine tuning..great tip!

[Fire-Tech]

Thanks J...and thanks for mentioning the codepen. I always forget about it. Originally, I was going to convert them to PDF, but after a handful of converters, I couldn't find anything that didn't break the code or wasn't super expensive ;)

[Garfield Archivist]

Great tip Fire-Tech. I just sent out a broadcast message last night. This morning I saw your discussion and was able to save my html code as an html page. I viewed it in my browser and it looked great.

The benefit of the custom link is that once saved it can be added to the Broadcast Message as a link titled "View as a web page" just like all those fancy html newsletters offer.

Thanks.

[Fire-Tech]

Thanks Garfield. That's a good idea to add the Web page version link ;)

[Garfield Archivist]

I sent a broadcast message today and it worked perfectly.

[Fire-Tech]

Sweetness ;)