The Letter by Mary Cassatt

by Nina

As man of you know, by profession I’m a writer and editor, as well as a yoga teacher. But what you might not know is that in addition to doing the writing and editing functions for the blog, I also handle all the technical aspects of the blog and the website, even though that’s not something I’m trained to do. Basically I just try my best, and sometimes that means figuring things out as I go. So there are many things I don’t know and unexpected things do happen. Today I want to apologize for two unexpected things that happened in the email feed this week: the completely inappropriate ad that accompanied the post from March 14/15 and the problem with the brain health chapter that you couldn’t read that came out today, March 18. First of all, let me say I’m very sorry and am working on fixing both problems! And now, if you want more explanations, I’ll describe each situation in more detail.

Inappropriate Ad in the Feed

The morning the post Permission to Grieve was emailed, I heard from an email subscriber that the ad accompanying email that was sent out (which is called our feed) was an anti-vax ad. Those of you who know anything about this blog—and me—will realize that I was extremely upset by this and I felt so sorry people had to endure seeing the ad and that it was associated in any way with our blog. I had no idea that this ad would be used and I didn’t know if it was just that one person who got that ad, multiple people, or everyone. But I immediately contacted the company, follow.it, which creates and sends the emails (at no cost to you), and let them know this wasn’t acceptable and ask them for help removing the ad and preventing such ads in the future.

Since then, I heard from a few more people who had the same complaint. But I also heard back from follow.it, who said this:

“We checked and although the ad is against the mandatory aspect of vaccines, we understand that it may still be upsetting for certain readers and so we forwarded the complaint to our email ads provider.

We disabled the ads for your feed temporarily until we get the confirmation from Jeeng that they removed this particular ad.”

In the meantime, I wrote back to them to discuss how we can prevent things like this from happening in the future. Obviously we don’t want any political and/or anti-science ads in our feed. I haven’t yet heard back about this general problem. Fingers crossed there is something we can do about it, even if it means paying more for the service.

Unreadable Chapter in the Feed

All right, this problem was completely due to me being forgetful and probably distracted (lots going on this week). It was a long time since I made a post with an embedded pdf reader in it (which is what allows you to read the book chapter). And, basically, when a post has an embedded pdf reader or a video in it for that matter, the email created for that post can’t send you the reader or video viewer so it just puts a black box there instead. The only way to actually read the chapter or watch the video is to do it on the blog itself. So normally I put that in the post and tell people that they can read the chapter or see the video by clicking on the title of the post (which is a link to the original post). If you want to see it right now, you can go here.

Then, haha, I decided to redo the post and send it again with the explanation. But I was in such a hurry that I forgot to put a title in the post—ugh—the worst thing I could omit since you need to use it to read the chapter! So then I redid the original post a second time, this time with a title. But all that meant you will have gotten two more emails with this post in it, one with no title—so embarrassing—and one with a title.

I hereby vow to try to remember to have every post with a video or chapter in it remind you of how to access it!

But do keep in mind for the future, if you have a problem reading a post in your email, you can just click on the title to read it on the blog or just go to https://www.yogafortimesofchange.com/blog/

Whew! Sorry about all that.

Thanks so much for being understanding,

Nina